Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I

VOLUME 151

NUMBER 5

MAY 1933

BY GERTRUDE STEIN

I was born in San Francisco, California. I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate, but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it.

Up to my twentieth year I was seriously interested in music. I studied and practised assiduously, but shortly then it seemed futile; my mother had died and there was no unconquerable sadness, but there was no real interest that led me on. In the story of Ada in Geography and Plays Gertrude Stein has given a very good description of me as I was at that time.

From then on for about six years I was well occupied. I led a pleasant life, I had many friends, much amusement, many interests; my life was reasonably full and I enjoyed it, but I was not very ardent in it. This brings me to the San Francisco fire, which had as a consequence that the elder brother of Gertrude Stein and his wife came back from Paris to San Francisco, and this led to a complete change in my life.

I was at this time living with my father and brother. My father was a quiet man who took things quietly, although he felt them deeply. The first terrible morning of the San Francisco fire I woke him and told him, ‘The city has been rocked by an earthquake and is now on fire.’ ‘That will give us a black eye in the East,’ he replied, turning and going to sleep again.

As I was saying, we were all living comfortably together and there had been in my mind no active desire or thought of change. The disturbance of the routine of our lives by the fire, followed by the coming of Gertrude Stein’s older brother and his wife, made the difference.

Mrs. Stein brought with her three little Matisse paintings, the first modern things to cross the Atlantic. I made her acquaintance at this time of general upset and she showed them to me. She also told me many stories of her life in Paris. Gradually I told my father that perhaps I would leave San Francisco. He was not disturbed by this; after all there was at that time a great deal of going and coming, and there were many friends of mine going. Within a year I also had gone and I had come to Paris. There I went to see Mrs. Stein, who had in the meantime returned to Paris, and there at her house I met Gertrude Stein. I was impressed by the coral brooch she wore and by her voice.

Copyright 1933, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius, and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken; and I may say that in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people, I have met several great people, but I have only known three firstclass geniuses; and in each case, on sight, within me something rang. In no one of the three cases have I been mistaken. In this way my new full life began.

II

This was the year 1907. Gertrude Stein was just seeing through the press Three Lives, which she was having privately printed, and she was deep in The Making of Americans, her thousand-page book. Picasso had just finished his portrait of her which nobody at that time liked except the painter and the painted, and which is now so famous, and he had just begun his strange complicated picture of three women. Matisse had just finished his Bonheur de Vivre. It was the moment Max Jacob has since called the heroic age of cubism. I remember not long ago hearing Picasso and Gertrude Stein talking about various things that had happened at that time. One of them said, ‘But all that could not have happened in that one year.’ ‘Oh,’ said the other, ‘my dear, you forget we were young then, and we did a great deal in a year. ’

There are a great many things to tell of what was happening then and what had happened before, which led up to then, but now I must describe what I saw when I came.

The home at 27 rue de Fleurus consisted then, as it does now, of a tiny pavilion of two stories with four small rooms, a kitchen and bath, and a very large atelier adjoining. I had been invited to dine on Saturday evening, which was the evening when everybody came, and indeed everybody did come. I went to dinner. The dinner was cooked by Hélène. I must tell a little about Hélène.

Hélène had already been two years with Gertrude Stein and her brother. She was one of those admirable bonnes — in other words, excellent maids of all work, good cooks thoroughly occupied with the welfare of their employers and of themselves, firmly convinced that everything purchasable was far too dear. ‘Oh but it is dear,’ was her answer to any question. She wasted nothing and carried on the household at the regular rate of eight francs a day. She even wanted to include guests at that price — it was her pride — but of course that was difficult since she, for the honor of her house as well as to satisfy her employers, always had to give everyone enough to eat. She was a most excellent cook, and she made a very good soufflé.

Hélène had her opinions. She did not, for instance, like Matisse. She said a Frenchman should not stay unexpectedly to a meal, particularly if he asked the servant beforehand what there was for dinner. She said foreigners had a perfect right to do these things, but not a Frenchman, and Matisse had once done it. So when Miss Stein said to her, ‘Monsieur Matisse is staying for dinner this evening,’ she would say, ‘In that case I will not make an omelette, but fry the eggs. It takes the same number of eggs and the same amount of butter, but it shows less respect, and he will understand.’

III

Before I tell about the guests I must tell what I saw. As I said, being invited to dinner, I rang the bell of the little pavilion and was taken into the tiny hall, and then into the small dining room lined with books. On the only free space, the doors, were tacked up a few drawings by Picasso and Matisse. As the other guests had not yet come, Miss Stein took me into the atelier.

Against the walls were several pieces of large Italian Renaissance furniture, and in the middle of the room was a big Renaissance table, on it a lovely inkstand, and at one end of it notebooks neatly arranged, the kind of notebooks French children use, with pictures of earthquakes and explorations on the outside of them. And on all the walls, right up to the ceiling, were pictures. At one end of the room was a big castiron stove that Hélène came in and filled with a rattle, and in one corner of the room was a large table on which were horseshoe nails and pebbles and little pipe cigarette holders which one looked at curiously but did not touch, but which turned out later to be accumulations from the pockets of Picasso and Gertrude Stein.

But to return to the pictures. The pictures were so strange that one quite instinctively looked at anything rather than at them just at first. It is very difficult, now that everybody is accustomed to everything, to give some idea of the kind of uneasiness one felt when one first looked at all these pictures on these walls. In those days there were pictures of all kinds there. The time had not yet come when they were only Cézannes, Renoirs, Matisses, and Picassos, nor, as it was even later, only Cézannes and Picassos. At that time there was a great deal of Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, Cézanne, but there were also a great many other things. There were two Gauguins, there were Manguins, there was a big nude by Valloton, there was a ToulouseLautrec. There was a portrait of Gertrude Stein by Valloton that might have been a David but was not, there was a Maurice Denis, a little Daumier, many Cézanne water colors. There was, in short, everything. There was even a little Delacroix and a moderatesized Greco. There were enormous Picassos of the Harlequin period, there were two rows of Matisses, there was a big portrait of a woman by Cezanne and some little Cezannes.

All these pictures had a history and I will soon tell them. Now I was confused, and I looked and I looked and I was confused. Gertrude Stein and her brother were so accustomed to this state of mind in a guest that they paid no attention to it.

Then there was a sharp tap at the atelier door. Gertrude Stein opened it, and a little dark dapper man came in with hair, eyes, face, hands, and feet all very much alive. ‘Hullo, Alfy,’ she said, ' this is Miss Toklas.’ ‘ How do you do, Miss Toklas,’ he said very solemnly.

This was Alfy Maurer, an old habitué of the house. He had been there before there were these pictures, when there were only Japanese prints, and he was among those who used to light matches to light up a little piece of the Cézanne portrait. ‘Of course you can tell it is a finished picture,’ he used to explain to the other American painters who came and looked dubiously, ‘you can tell because it has a frame. Now whoever heard of anybody framing a canvas if the picture is n’t finished.’ He had followed, followed, followed, always humbly, always sincerely; it was he who selected the first lot of pictures for the famous Barnes collection some years later, faithfully and enthusiastically. It was he who, when later Barnes came to the house and waved his check book, said, ‘So help me God, I did n’t bring him.’

IV

But to return to that first evening. A few minutes after Alfy came in there was a violent knock at the door, and ‘Dinner is ready’ from Hélène. ‘It’s funny the Picassos have not come,’ said they all. ‘However, we won’t wait, at least Hélène won’t wait.’ So we went into the court and into the pavilion and dining room, and began dinner.

‘It’s funny,’ said Miss Stein, ‘Pablo is always promptness itself. He is never early and he is never late; it is his pride that punctuality is the politeness of kings; he even makes Fernande punctual. Of course he often says yes when he has no intention of doing what he says yes to. He can’t, say no. No is not in his vocabulary, and you have to know whether his yes means yes or means no. But when he says a yes that means yes, and he did about to-night, he is always punctual.’ These were the days before automobiles and nobody worried about accidents.

We had just finished the first course when there was a quick patter of footsteps in the court and Hélène opened the door before the bell rang. Pablo and Fernande, as everybody called them at that time, walked in. He, small, quick-moving but not restless, his eyes having a strange faculty of opening wide and drinking in what he wished to see. He had the isolation and movement of the head of a bullfighter at the head of their procession. Fernande was a tall beautiful woman with a wonderful big hat and a very evidently new dress. They were both very fussed. ‘I am very upset,’ said Pablo. ‘You know very well, Gertrude, I am never late, but Fernande had ordered a dress for the vernissage to-morrow and it did n’t come.’

‘Well, here you are anyway,’ said Miss Stein. ‘Since it’s you, Hélène won’t mind.’ And we all sat down.

I was next to Picasso, who was silent and then gradually became peaceful. Alfy paid compliments to Fernande and she was soon calm and placid. After a little while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘everybody says that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference — she will,’ he said.

The conversation soon became lively. It was all about the opening day of the salon indépendant which was the great event of the year. Everybody was interested in all the scandals that would or would not break out. Picasso never exhibited, but as his followers did and there were a great many stories connected with each follower, the hopes and fears were vivacious.

While we were having coffee footsteps were heard in the court, quite a number of footsteps, and Miss Stein rose and said, ‘Don’t hurry, I have to let them in.’ And she left.

When we went into the atelier there were already quite a number of people in the room, scattered groups, single and couples, all looking and looking. Gertrude Stein sat by the stove talking and listening and getting up to open the door and go up to various people talking and listening. She usually opened the door to the knock, and the usual formula was, ‘ De la part de qui venez-vous? Who is your introducer?’ The idea was that anybody could come, but for form’s sake, and in Paris you have to have a formula, everybody was supposed to be able to mention the name of somebody who had told them about it. It was a mere form. Everybody could come in, and as at that time these pictures had no value and there was no social privilege attached to knowing anyone there, only those came who really were interested. So, as I say, anybody could come in; however, there was the formula. Miss Stein, once in opening the door, said as she usually did, ‘By whose invitation do you come?’ and we heard an aggrieved voice reply, ‘But by yours, madame.’ He was a young man Gertrude Stein had met somewhere and with whom she had had a long conversation and to whom she had given a cordial invitation, and then had as promptly forgotten.

V

The room was soon very very full, and who were they all? Groups of Hungarian painters and writers. It happened that some Hungarian had once been brought, and the word had spread from him throughout all Hungary. Any village where there was a young man who had ambitions heard of 27 rue de Fleurus, and then he lived but to get there, and a great many did get there. They were always there, all sizes and shapes, all degrees of wealth and poverty, some very charming, some simply rough, and every now and then a very beautiful young peasant. Then there were quantities of Germans, not too popular because they tended always to want to see anything that was put away, and they tended to break things; and Gertrude Stein has a weakness for breakable objects — she has a horror of people who collect only the unbreakable. Then there was a fair sprinkling of Americans. Mildred Aldrich would bring a group, or Sayen, the electrician, or some painter, and occasionally an architectural student would accidentally get there. And then there were the habituées, among them Miss Mars and Miss Squires, whom Gertrude Stein afterwards immortalized in her story of Miss Furr and Miss Skeene.

From time to time one heard the high Spanish whinnying laugh of Picasso, the gay contralto outbreak of Gertrude Stein. People came and went, in and out. Miss Stein told me to sit with Fernande. Fernande was always beautiful, but heavy in hand. I sat — it was my first sitting with a wife of a genius.

Before I decided to write this book, my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many. I have sat with wives who were not wives, of geniuses who were real geniuses. I have sat with real wives of geniuses who were not real geniuses. I have sat with wives of geniuses, of near geniuses, of wouldbe geniuses; in short, I have sat very often and very long with many wives and wives of many geniuses.

As I was saying, Fernande, who was then living with Picasso and had been with him a long time — that is to say, they were both twenty-six years old at that time, but they had been together a long time — Fernande was the first wife of a genius I sat with, and she was not the least amusing. We talked hats. Fernande had two subjects — hats and perfumes. This first day we talked hats. She liked hats, she had the true French feeling about a hat; if a hat did not provoke some witticism from a man on the street, the hat was not a success. Later on, once in Montmartre, she and I were walking together. She had on a large yellow hat and I had on a much smaller blue one. As we were walking along a workman stopped and called out, ‘There go the sun and the moon shining together.’ ‘Ah,’said Fernande to me with a radiant smile, ‘ you see our hats are a success/

Miss Stein called me and said she wanted to have me meet Matisse. She was talking to a medium-sized man with a reddish beard and glasses. He had a very alert although slightly heavy presence, and Miss Stein and he seemed to be full of hidden meanings.

As I came up I heard her say, ‘Oh yes, but it would be more difficult now. . . . We were talking,’ she said, ‘of a lunch party we had in here last year. We had just hung all the pictures and we asked all the painters. You know how painters are. I wanted to make them happy, so I placed each one opposite his own picture, and they were happy — so happy that we had to send out twice for more bread. When you know France you will know that that means that they were happy, because they cannot eat and drink without bread, and we had to send out twice for bread, so they were happy. Nobody noticed my little arrangement except Matisse, and he did not until just as he left, and now he says it is a proof that I am very wicked.’

Matisse laughed and said, ‘Yes, I know Mademoiselle Gertrude. The world is a theatre for you, but there are theatres and theatres, and when you listen so carefully to me and so attentively and do not hear a word I say, then I do say that you are very wicked.’ Then they both began talking about the vernissage of the independent as everyone else was doing, and of course I did not know what it was all about.

Later I was near Picasso. He was standing meditatively. ‘Do you think,’ he said, ‘that I really do look like your President Lincoln?’ I had thought a good many things that evening, but I had not thought that. ‘You see,’ he went on, ‘Gertrude (I wish I could convey something of the simple affection and confidence with which he always pronounced her name and with which she always said Pablo. In all their long friendship, with all its sometimes troubled moments and its complications, this had never changed) — Gertrude showed me a photograph of him, and I have been trying to arrange my hair to look like his. I think my forehead does.’ I did not know whether he meant it or not, but I was sympathetic.

I did not realize then how completely and entirely American was Gertrude Stein. Later I often teased her, calling her a general, a Civil War general of either or both sides. She had a series of photographs of the Civil War, rather wonderful photographs, and she and Picasso used to pore over them. Then he would suddenly remember the Spanish War and become very Spanish and very bitter, and Spain and America in their persons could say very bitter things about each other’s country. But at this my first evening I knew nothing of all this, and so I was polite and that was all.

VI

The next day I saw Gertrude Stein again, and she said solemnly, ‘Do you want to take French lessons?’

I hesitated, ‘Why yes, I could take French lessons.’

‘Well, Fernande will give you French lessons. Go and tell her how absolutely you are pining to take French lessons.’

‘But why should she give me French lessons?’ I asked.

‘Because, well because she and Pablo have decided to separate forever. I suppose it has happened before, but not since I have known them. You know Pablo says if you love a woman you give her money, and when you want to leave a woman you have to wait until you have enough money to give her. Vollard has just bought out his atelier, and so he can afford to separate from her by giving her half. She wants to install herself in a room by herself and give French lessons, so that is how you come in.’

I agreed to the arrangement, and about ten days later Gertrude Stein and I went to Montmartre, I for the first time. I have never ceased to love it. We go there every now and then and I always have the same tender expectant feeling that I had then. It is a place where you were always standing, and sometimes waiting, not for anything to happen, but just standing. The inhabitants of Montmartre did not sit much; they mostly stood, which was just as well since the chairs, the diningroom chairs of France, did not tempt one to sit. So I went to Montmartre and began my apprenticeship of standing. We first went to see Picasso, and then we went to see Fernande.

At this time he lived in the rue Ravignan. Gertrude Stein knocked and Picasso opened the door and we went in.

He was dressed in what the French call the singe or monkey costume, overalls made of blue jean or brown. I think his was blue, and it is called a singe or monkey because, being all of one piece with a belt, if the belt is not fastened, and it very often is not, it hangs down behind and so makes a monkey. His eyes were even more wonderful than I remembered, so full and so brown, and his hands so dark and delicate and alert. We went further in. There was a couch in one corner, a very small stove that did for cooking and heating in the other corner, some chairs, the large broken one Gertrude Stein sat in when she was painted, and a general smell of dog and paint. There was a big dog there, and Picasso moved her about from one place to another exactly as if the dog had been a large piece of furniture. He asked us to sit down, but as all the chairs were full we all stood up, and stood until we left.

Against the wall was an enormous picture, a strange picture of light and dark colors, that is all I can say, of a group, an enormous group; and next to it another in a sort of red brown, of three women, square and posturing, all of it rather frightening. Picasso and Gertrude Stein stood together talking. I stood back and looked. I cannot say I realized anything, but I felt that there was something painful and beautiful there, and oppressive but imprisoned.

They continued a low-toned conversation, then Miss Stein said: ‘Well, we have to go. We are going to have tea with Fernande.’

‘Yes, I know,’ replied Picasso.

‘ How often do you see her? ’ she said.

He got very red and looked sheepish. ‘ I have never been there,’ he said resentfully.

She chuckled. ‘Well, anyway we are going there,’ she said, ‘and Miss Toklas is going to have lessons in French. . . . Oh I forgot to give you these,’ said Gertrude Stein, handing Picasso a package of newspapers. ‘They will console you.’

He opened them up. They were the Sunday supplements of American papers, they were the Katzenjammer kids. ‘Oh oui, oh oui,’ he said, his face full of satisfaction, ‘merci, Gertrude,’ and we left.

We left then and continued to climb higher up the hill. At a little house we asked for Mademoiselle Bellevallée, and we were sent into a little corridor; we knocked and went into a moderatesized room in which were a very large bed and a piano and a little tea table, and Fernande and two others.

The conversation around the tea table of Fernande was not lively. Nobody had anything to say. It was a pleasure to meet, it was even an honor, but that was about all. Fernande complained a little that her charwoman had not adequately dusted and rinsed the tea things, and also that buying a bed and a piano on the installment plan had elements of unpleasantness. Otherwise we really none of us had much to say. Finally she and I arranged about the French lessons; I was to pay fifty cents an hour, and she was to come to see me two days hence and we were to begin. Just at the end of the visit they were more natural. Fernande asked Miss Stein if she had any of the comic supplements of the American papers left. Gertrude Stein replied that she had just left them with Pablo.

Fernande roused like a lioness defending her cubs. ‘That is a brutality I will never forgive him,’ she said. ‘I met him on the street, he had a comic supplement in his hand, I asked him to give it to me to help me to distract myself, and he brutally refused. It was a piece of cruelty that I will never forgive. I ask you, Gertrude, to give to me myself the next copies you have of the comic supplement.’

Gertrude Stein said, ‘Why certainly, with pleasure.’

As we went out she said to me, ‘It is to be hoped that they will be together again before the next comic supplements of the Katzenjammer kids come out, because if I do not give them to Pablo he will be all upset, and if I do Fernande will make an awful fuss. Well I suppose I will have to lose them or have my brother give them to Pablo by mistake.’

The next time I saw Gertrude Stein she said to me suddenly, ‘Is Fernande wearing her earrings?’

‘I do not know,’ I said.

‘Well, notice,’ she said.

The next time I saw Gertrude Stein I said, ‘Yes, Fernande is wearing her earrings.’

‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘there is nothing to be done yet. It’s a nuisance because Pablo, naturally having nobody in the studio, cannot stay at home.’

In another week I was able to announce that Fernande was not wearing her earrings.

‘Oh well it’s all right then; she has no more money left and it is all over,’ said Gertrude Stein.

And it was. A week later I was dining with Fernande and Pablo at the rue de Fleurus.

VII

And now I will tell how two Americans happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world at that time knew nothing.

During Gertrude Stein’s last two years at the Medical School, Johns Hopkins, Baltimore, 1900-1903, her brother was living in Florence. There he heard of a painter named Cézanne, and saw paintings by him owned by Charles Loesser. When he and his sister made their home in Paris the following year they went to Vollard’s, the only picture dealer who had Cézannes for sale, to look at them.

The first visit to Vollard has left an indelible impression on Gertrude Stein. It was an incredible place. It did not look like a picture gallery. Inside there were a couple of canvases turned to the wall, in one corner was a small pile of big and little canvases thrown pellmell on top of one another, in the centre of the room stood a huge dark man glooming. This was Vollard cheerful. When he was really cheerless he put his huge frame against the glass door that led to the street, his arms above his head, his hands on each upper corner of the portal, and gloomed darkly into the street. Nobody thought then of trying to come in.

They asked to see Cézannes. He looked less gloomy and became quite polite. As they found out afterward, Cézanne was the great romance of Vollard’s life. The name Cézanne was to him a magic word. He had first learned about Cézanne from Pissarro the painter. Pissarro, indeed, was the man from whom all the early Cézanne lovers heard about Cézanne. Cézanne at that time was living gloomy and embittered at Aix-en-Provence. Pissarro told Vollard about him; told Fabry, a Florentine, who told Loesser; told Picabia, in fact told everybody who knew about Cézanne at that time.

They told Monsieur Vollard they wanted to see some Cézanne landscapes, they had been sent to him by Mr. Loesser of Florence. ' Oh yes,’ said Vollard looking quite cheerful, and he began moving about the room. Finally he disappeared behind a partition in the back and was heard heavily mounting the steps. After a quite long wait he came down again and had in his hand a tiny picture of an apple with most of the canvas unpainted. They all looked at this thoroughly, then they said, ‘Yes, but you see, what we wanted to see was a landscape.’

‘Ah yes,’ sighed Vollard, and he looked even more cheerful. After a moment he again disappeared, and this time came back with a painting of a back. It was a beautiful painting — there is no doubt about that — but the brother and sister were not yet up to a full appreciation of Cézanne nudes, and so they returned to the attack. They wanted to see a landscape.

This time, after even a longer wait, he came back with a very large canvas and a very little fragment of a landscape painted on it. Yes, that was it, they said, a landscape; but what they wanted was a smaller canvas but one all covered. They said they thought they would like to see one like that.

By this time the early winter evening of Paris was closing in, and just at this moment a very aged charwoman came down the same back stairs, mumbled, ‘Bon soir monsieur et madame,’ and quietly went out of the door. After a moment another old charwoman came down the same stairs, murmured, ‘Bon soir messieurs et mesdames,’ and went quietly out of the door.

Gertrude Stein began to laugh and said to her brother: ‘It is all nonsense, there is no Cezanne. Vollard goes upstairs and tells these old women what to paint, and he does not understand us and they do not understand him, and they paint something and he brings it down, and it is a Cezanne.’ They both began to laugh uncontrollably. Then they recovered and once more explained about the landscape. They said what they wanted was one of those marvelously yellow sunny Aix landscapes of which Loesser had several examples.

Once more Vollard went off, and this time he came back with a wonderful small green landscape. It was lovely, it covered all the canvas, it did not cost much, and they bought it. Later on Vollard explained to everyone that he had been visited by two crazy Americans, and they laughed and he had been much annoyed, but gradually he found out that when they laughed most they usually bought something, so of course he waited for them to laugh.

Before the winter was over, Gertrude Stein and her brother decided to buy a big Cézanne. They convinced their elder brother that this outlay was necessary, and it was necessary as will soon be evident. They told Vollard that they wanted to buy a Cézanne portrait. In those days practically no big Cézanne portraits had been sold. Vollard owned almost all of them. He was enormously pleased with this decision. They now were introduced into the room above the steps behind the partition where Gertrude Stein had been sure the old charwomen painted the Cézannes, and there they spent days deciding which portrait they would have. There were about eight to choose from and the decision was difficult. Finally they narrowed the choice down to two, a portrait of a man and a portrait of a woman, and finally they chose the portrait of the woman.

Vollard said, ‘Of course, ordinarily a portrait of a woman is more expensive than a portrait of a man, but,’ said he, looking at the picture very carefully, ‘I suppose with Cezanne it does not make any difference.’ They put it in a cab and they went home with it. It was this picture that Alfy Maurer used to explain was finished, and that you could tell that it was finished because it had a frame. It was an important purchase because, in looking and looking at this picture, Gertrude Stein wrote Three Lives.

VIII

The next thing that happened was in the autumn. It was the first year of the autumn salon, the first autumn salon that had ever existed in Paris, and they, very eager and excited, went to see it. There they found Matisse’s picture afterwards known as La Femme au Chapeau.

This first autumn salon was a step in official recognition of the outlaws of the independent salon. The pictures were to be shown in the Petit Palais opposite the Grand Palais where the great spring salon was held. That is, those outlaws were to be shown there who had succeeded enough so that they began to be sold in important picture shops. These, in collaboration with some rebels from the old salons, had created the autumn salon.

The show had a great deal of freshness and was not alarming. There were a number of attractive pictures, but there was one that was not attractive. It infuriated the public, they tried to scratch off the paint.

Gertrude Stein liked that picture; it was a portrait of a woman with a long face and a fan. It was very strange in its color and in its anatomy. She said she wanted to buy it. Her brother had in the meantime found a whiteclothed woman on a green lawn and he wanted to buy it. So they decided to buy two, and they went to the office of the secretary of the salon to find out about prices. They had never been in the little room of a secretary of a salon and it was very exciting. The secretary looked up the prices in the catalogue. Gertrude Stein has forgotten how much and even whose it was, the white dress and dog on the green grass, but the Matisse was five hundred francs. The secretary explained that of course one never paid what the artist asked, one suggested a price. They asked what price they should suggest. He asked them what they were willing to pay. They said they did not know. He suggested that they offer four hundred and he would let them know. They agreed and left.

The next day they received word from the secretary that Monsieur Matisse had refused to accept the offer, and what did they want to do. They decided to go over to the salon and look at the picture again. They did. People were roaring with laughter at the picture and scratching at it. Gertrude Stein could not understand why, the picture seemed to her perfectly natural. The Cézanne portrait had not seemed natural, it had taken her some time to feel that it was natural, but this picture by Matisse seemed perfectly natural and she could not understand why it infuriated everybody. Her brother was less attracted, but all the same he agreed and they bought it. She then went back to look at it and it upset her to see them all mocking at it. It bothered her and angered her because she did not understand why, because to her it was so all right, just as later she did not understand why, since the writing was all so clear and natural, they mocked at and were enraged by her work.

IX

This was the story of the buying of La Femme au Chapeau by the buyers, and now for the story from the sellers’ point of view, as told some months after by Monsieur and Madame Matisse. Shortly after the purchase of the picture they all asked to meet each other. Whether Matisse wrote and asked, or whether they wrote and asked, Gertrude Stein does not remember. Anyway, in no time they were knowing each other, and knowing each other very well.

The Matisses lived on the quay just off the boulevard Saint-Michel. They were on the top floor in a small threeroom apartment with a lovely view over Notre-Dame and the river. Madame Matisse was an admirable housekeeper. Her place was small but immaculate. She kept the house in order, she was an excellent cook and provider, she posed for all of Matisse’s pictures. It was she who was La Femme au Chapeau, lady with a hat. She had kept a little millinery shop to keep them going in their poorest days. She was a very straight dark woman with a long face and a firm, large, loosely hung mouth like a horse. She had an abundance of dark hair.

They had with them a daughter of Matisse, a daughter he had had before his marriage, and who had had diphtheria and had had to have an operation and for many years had to wear a black ribbon around her throat with a silver button. This Matisse put into many of his pictures. The girl was exactly like her father. Madame Matisse, as she once explained in her melodramatic simple way, did more than her duty by this child because, having read in her youth a novel in which the heroine had done so and been consequently much loved all her life, she had decided to do the same. She herself had had two boys, but they were neither of them at that time living with them. The younger, Pierre, was in the south of France on the borders of Spain with Madame Matisse’s father and mother, and the elder, Jean, with Monsieur Matisse’s father and mother in the north of France on the borders of Belgium.

The Matisses had had a hard time. Matisse had come to Paris as a young man to study pharmacy. His people were small grain merchants. He had become interested in painting, had begun copying the Poussins at the Louvre, and become a painter fairly without the consent of his people, who however continued to allow him the very small monthly sum he had had as a student. His daughter was born at this time and this further complicated his life. He had at first a certain amount of success. He married. Under the influence of the paintings of Poussin and Chardin he had painted still-life pictures that had considerable success at the Champ-de-Mars salon, one of the two big spring salons. And then he fell under the influence of Cézanne, and then under the influence of Negro sculpture. All this developed the Matisse of the period of La Femme au Chapeau.

The year after his very considerable success at the salon he spent the winter painting a very large picture of a woman setting a table, and on the table was a magnificent dish of fruit. It had strained the resources of the Matisse family to buy this fruit. Fruit was horribly dear in Paris in those days, even ordinary fruit; imagine how much dearer was this very extraordinary fruit, and it had to keep until the picture was completed, and the picture was going to take a long time. In order to keep it as long as possible they kept the room as cold as possible, and that under the roof and in a Paris winter was not difficult. Matisse painted in an overcoat and gloves, and he painted at it all winter. It was finished at last and sent to the salon where the year before Matisse had had considerable success, and there it was refused.

And now Matisse’s serious troubles began, his daughter was very ill, he was in an agonizing mental struggle concerning his work. Every morning he painted, every afternoon he worked at his sculpture, late every afternoon he drew in the sketch classes from the nude, and every evening he played his violin. These were very dark days and he was very despairful. His wife opened a small millinery shop and they managed to live.

The only encouragement came in the atelier where he worked, and where a crowd of young men began to gather around him and be influenced by him. Among these the best known at that time was Manguin, the best known now Derain. Derain was a very young man at that time, he enormously admired Matisse, he went away to the country with them to Collioure near Perpignan, and he was a great comfort to them all. He began to paint landscapes, outlining his trees with red. He had a sense of space that was quite his own and which first showed itself in a landscape of a cart going up a road bordered with trees lined in red. His paintings were coming to be known at the independent.

X

Then came the first autumn salon and Matisse was asked to exhibit, and he sent La Femme au Chapeau and it was hung. It was derided and attacked, and it was sold. Matisse was at this time about thirty-five years old, he was depressed. Having gone to the opening day of the salon and heard what was said of his picture and seen what they were trying to do to it, he never went again. His wife went alone. He stayed at home and was unhappy.

This is the way Madame Matisse used to tell the story. A note came from the secretary of the salon saying that there had been an offer made for the picture, an offer of four hundred francs. Matisse was painting Madame Matisse as a gypsy holding a guitar. This guitar had already had a history. Madame Matisse was very fond of telling the story. She had a great deal to do and she posed beside, and she was very healthy and sleepy. One day she was posing, he was painting, she began to nod, and as she nodded the guitar made noises. ‘Stop it,’ said Matisse, ‘wake up.’ She woke up, he painted, she nodded, and the guitar made noises. ‘Stop it,’ said Matisse, ‘wake up.’ She woke up, and then in a little while she nodded again and the guitar made even more noises. Matisse, furious, seized the guitar and broke it. ‘And,’ added Madame Matisse ruefully, ‘we were very hard up then, and we had to have it mended so he could go on with the picture.’

She was holding this same mended guitar and posing when the note from the secretary of the autumn salon came. Matisse was joyful. ‘Of course I will accept,’ said Matisse. ‘Oh no,’ said Madame Matisse, ‘ if those people (ces gens) are interested enough to make an offer, they are interested enough to pay the price you asked,’ and she added, ‘the difference would make winter clothes for Margot.’ Matisse hesitated but was finally convinced, and they sent a note saying he wanted his price.

Nothing happened, and Matisse was in a terrible state and very reproachful, and then in a day or two, when Madame Matisse was once more posing with the guitar and Matisse was painting, Margot brought them a little blue telegram. Matisse opened it and he made a grimace.

Madame Matisse was terrified; she thought the worst had happened. The guitar fell. ‘What is it?’ she said.

‘They have bought it,’ he said.

‘Why do you make such a face of agony and frighten me so, and perhaps break the guitar?’ she said.

‘I was winking at you,’ he said, ‘to tell you, because I was so moved I could not speak.’

And so Madame Matisse used to end up the story triumphantly, ‘You see it was I, and I was right to insist upon the original price.’

The friendship with the Matisses grew apace. Matisse at that time was at work at his first big decoration, Le Bonheur de Vivre. He was making small and larger and very large studies for it. It was in this picture that Matisse first clearly realized his intention of deforming the drawing of the human body in order to harmonize and intensify the color values of all the simple colors mixed only with white. He used his distorted drawing as a dissonance is used in music, or as vinegar or lemons are used in cooking, or eggshells in coffee, to clarify. I do inevitably take my comparisons from the kitchen because I like food and cooking and know something about it. However this was the idea.

Little by little people began to come to the rue de Fleurus to see the Matisses and the Cézannes. Matisse brought people, everybody brought somebody. They came at any time and it began to be a nuisance, and it was in this way that the Saturday evenings began.

It was also at this time that Gertrude Stein got into the habit of writing at night. It was only after eleven o’clock that she could be sure that no one would knock at the studio door. She was at that time planning her long book, The Making of Americans, she was struggling with her sentences, those long sentences that had to be so exactly carried out. Sentences, not only words but sentences, and always sentences, have been Gertrude Stein’s lifelong passion. And so she had then — and indeed it lasted pretty well to the war, which broke down so many habits — she had then the habit of beginning her work at eleven o’clock at night and working until the dawn. She said she always tried to stop before the dawn was too clear and the birds were too lively because it is a disagreeable sensation to go to bed then. There were birds in many trees behind high walls in those days, now there are fewer. But often the birds and the dawn caught her, and she stood in the court waiting to get used to it before she went to bed. She had the habit then of sleeping until noon, and the beating of the rugs into the court — everybody did that in those days, even her household did — was one of her most poignant irritations.

XI

It was about this time that Gertrude Stein’s brother happened one day to find the picture gallery of Sagot, an ex-circus clown who had a picture shop further up the rue Laffitte beyond Vollard’s. Here he, Gertrude Stein’s brother, found the paintings of two young Spaniards, one whose name everybody has forgotten, the other one, Picasso. The work of both of them interested him, and he bought a water color by the forgotten one, a café scene. A few days later he became interested in a big picture by Picasso. This was the now well-known painting of a nude girl with a basket of red flowers.

Gertrude Stein did not like the picture. She found something rather appalling in the drawing of the legs and feet, something that repelled and shocked her. She and her brother almost quarreled about this picture. He wanted it, and she did not want it in the house. Sagot, gathering a little of the discussion, said, ‘But that is all right. If you do not like the legs and feet, it is very easy to guillotine her and only take the head.’ ‘No, that would not do,’ everybody agreed, and nothing was decided. Gertrude Stein and her brother continued to be very divided in this matter, and they were very angry with each other. Finally it was agreed that since he, the brother, wanted it so badly, they would buy it, and in this way the first Picasso was brought into the rue de Fleurus.

It was only a very short time after this that Picasso began the portrait of Gertrude Stein, now so widely known, but just how that came about is a little vague in everybody’s mind. I have heard Picasso and Gertrude Stein talk about it often, and they neither of them can remember. They can remember the first time that Picasso dined at the rue de Fleurus, and they can remember the first time Gertrude Stein posed for her portrait at rue Ravignan, but in between there is a blank. How it came about they do not know. Picasso had never had anybody pose for him since he was sixteen years old; he was then twentyfour; and Gertrude Stein had never thought of having her portrait painted, and they do not either of them know how it came about. Anyway it did, and she posed to him for this portrait ninety times and a great deal happened during that time.

To go back to the first time: Picasso and Fernande came to dinner. Picasso in those days was what a dear friend and schoolmate of mine, Nelly Jacot, called a good-looking bootblack. He was thin, dark, alive with big pools of eyes, and a violent but not a rough way. He was sitting next to Gertrude Stein at dinner and she took up a piece of bread. ‘This,’ said Picasso, snatching it back with violence, ‘this piece of bread is mine.’ She laughed and he looked sheepish. That was the beginning of their intimacy.

Then there was the first time of posing. The atelier of Picasso I have already described. In those days there was even more disorder, more coming and going, more red-hot fire in the stove, more cooking and more interruptions. There was a large broken armchair where Gertrude Stein posed. There was a couch where everybody sat and slept. There was a little kitchen chair upon which Picasso sat to paint. There was a large easel and there were many very large canvases. It was at the height of the end of the Harlequin period when the canvases were enormous, the figures also, and the groups.

Fernande was, as always, very large, very beautiful, and very gracious. She offered to read La Fontaine’s stories aloud to amuse Gertrude Stein while she posed. She took her pose, Picasso sat very tight on his chair and very close to his canvas, and on a very small palette which was of a uniform brown-gray color mixed some more brown gray and the painting began. This was the first of ninety sittings.

Practically every afternoon Gertrude Stein went to Montmartre, posed, and then later wandered down the hill, usually walking across Paris to the rue de Fleurus. She then formed the habit which has never left her of walking around Paris, now accompanied by the dog, in those days alone. And Saturday evenings the Picassos walked home with her and dined, and then there was Saturday evening. During these long poses and these long walks Gertrude Stein meditated and made sentences. She was then in the middle of her Negro story ‘Melanctha Herbert,’ the second story of Three Lives, and the poignant incidents that she wove into the life of Melanctha were often these she noticed in walking down the hill from the rue Ravignan.

The winter went on. Three Lives was written. Gertrude Stein asked her sister-in-law to come and read it. She did, and was deeply moved. This pleased Gertrude Stein immensely. She did not believe that anyone could read anything she wrote and be interested. In those days she never asked anyone what they thought of her work, but whether they were interested enough to read it. Now she says if they can bring themselves to read it they will be interested.

Spring was coming and the sittings were coming to an end. All of a sudden one day, Picasso painted out the whole head. ‘I can’t see you any longer when I look,’ he said irritably. And so the picture was left like that.

Nobody remembers being particularly disappointed or annoyed at this ending to the long series of posings. There was the spring independent, and then Gertrude Stein and her brother were going to Italy, as was at that time their habit. Pablo and Fernande were going to Spain.

It was during this summer, which Gertrude Stein spent at Fiesole, near Florence, that she began her great book, The Making of Americans. It began with an old daily theme that she had written when at Radcliffe: —

Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. ‘Stop!' cried the groaning old man at last. ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’

It is hard living down the tempers we are born with. We all begin well. For in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others, and we fight them fiercely in ourselves; but we grow old and we see that these our sins are of all sins the really harmless ones to own, nay that they give a charm to any character, and so our struggle with them dies away.

It was to be the history of a family. It was a history of a family, but by the time I came to Paris it was getting to be a history of all human beings, all who ever were or are or could be living.

Gertrude Stein was working tremendously over the beginning of The Making of Americans and came back to Paris under the spell of the thing she was doing. She came back to a Paris fairly full of excitement. In the first place, she came back to her finished portrait. The day he returned from Spain, Picasso sat down and out of his head painted the head in without having seen Gertrude Stein again. And when she saw it, he and she were content. It is very strange, but neither can remember at all what the head looked like when he painted it out.

There is another charming story of the portrait. Only a few years ago when Gertrude Stein had had her hair cut short — she had always up to that time worn it as a crown on top of her head, as Picasso has painted it — when she had had her hair cut, a day or so later she happened to come into a room and Picasso was several rooms away. She had a hat on, but he caught sight of her through two doorways and, approaching her quickly, called out, ‘Gertrude, what is it, what is it?’

‘What is what, Pablo?’ she said.

‘Let me see,’ he said.

She let him see.

‘And my portrait,’ said he sternly. Then his face softening, he added, ‘Mais, quand mêne, tout y est. All the same it is all there.’

(To be continued next month)