Ernest Hemingway and the Post-War Decade: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Iv

I

IT is a confused memory those first years after the war, and very difficult to think back and remember what happened before or after something else. Picasso once said, I have already told, when Gertrude Stein and he were discussing dates, ‘You forget that when we were young an awful lot happened in a year.’ During the years just after the war, as I look, in order to refresh my memory, over the bibliography of Gertrude Stein’s work, I am astonished when I realize how many things happened in a year. Perhaps we were not so young then, but there were a great many young in the world and perhaps that comes to the same thing.

The old crowd had disappeared. Matisse was now permanently in Nice, and in any case although Gertrude Stein and he were perfectly good friends when they met, they practically never met. This was the time when Gertrude Stein and Picasso were not seeing each other. They always talked with the tenderest friendship about each other to anyone who had known them both, but they did not see each other. It was a period, this and a very considerable time afterward, that Gertrude Stein celebrated under the title, ‘Of Having for a Long Time Not Continued to Be Friends.’

Juan Gris was ill and discouraged, He had been very ill and was never really well again. Privation and discouragement had had their effect.

Mildred Aldrich had had her tremendous success with The Hilltop on the Marne. In Mildred’s way she had spent royally all she had earned royally, and was now still spending and enjoying it although getting a little uneasy. We used to go out and see her about once a month; in fact all the rest of her life we always managed to get out to sec her regularly. Even in the days of her very greatest glory she loved a visit from Gertrude Stein better than a visit from anybody else.

It was largely to please Mildred that Gertrude Stein tried to get the Atlantic Monthly to print something of hers. Mildred always felt and said that it would be a blue ribbon if the Atlantic Monthly consented, which of course it never did.

Another thing used to annoy Mildred dreadfully. Gertrude Stein’s name was never in Who’s Who in America. As a matter of fact it was in English authors’ bibliographies before it ever entered an American one. This troubled Mildred very much. ‘I hate to look at Who’s Who in America,’ she said to me, ‘when I see all those insignificant people and

Gertrude’s name not in.’ And then she would say, ‘I know it’s all right, but I wish Gertrude were not so outlawed.’ Poor Mildred. And now just this year, for reasons best known to themselves, Who ’s Who has added Gertrude Stein’s name to their list. The Atlantic Monthly, needless to say, has not.

The Atlantic Monthly story is rather funny.

As I said, Gertrude Stein sent the Atlantic Monthly some manuscripts, not with any hope of their accepting them, but if by any miracle they should, she would be pleased and Mildred delighted. An answer came back, a long and rather argumentative answer from the editorial office. Gertrude Stein, thinking that some Boston woman in the editorial office had written, answered the arguments lengthily to Miss Ellen Sedgwick. She received an almost immediate answer meeting all her arguments, and at the same time admitting that the matter was not without interest but that of course Atlantic Monthly readers could not be affronted by having these manuscripts presented in the review. The letter ended by saying that the writer was not Ellen.

Gertrude Stein of course was delighted with its being not Ellen.

II

We began to meet new people all the time. Sylvia Beech sent word that Sherwood Anderson had come to Paris and wanted to see Gertrude Stein and might he come. Gertrude Stein sent back word that she would be very pleased, and he came with his wife.

Gertrude Stein was in those days a little bitter, because of all her unpublished manuscripts, and no hope of publication or serious recognition. Sherwood Anderson came and quite simply and directly, as is his way, told her what he thought of her work and what it had meant to him in his development. He told it to her then and, what was even rarer, he told it in print immediately after. Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson have always been the best of friends but I do not believe even he realizes how much his visit meant to her. It was he who thereupon wrote the introduction to Geography and Plays.

Kate Buss brought lots of people to the house. She brought Djuna Barnes and Mina Loy, and they had wanted to bring James Joyce but they did n’t. We were glad to see Mina, whom we had known in Florence as Mina Haweis. Mina brought Glenway Wescott on his first trip to Europe. Glenway impressed us greatly by his English accent. Hemingway explained. He said, ‘When you matriculate at the University of Chicago you write down just what accent you will have, and they give it to you when you graduate. You can have a sixteenth-century or modern, whatever you like.’

We met Ezra Pound at Grace Lounsbury’s house. He came home to dinner with us and he stayed and he talked about Japanese prints among other things. Gertrude Stein liked him but did not find him amusing. She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not. Ezra also talked about T. S. Eliot. It was the first time anyone had talked about T. S. at the house. Pretty soon everybody talked about T. S. Kitty Buss talked about him and much later Hemingway talked about him as the Major. Considerably later, when Eliot was founding the Criterion, Lady Rothermere talked about him, and one day she brought him to see us.

Eliot and Gertrude Stein had a solemn conversation, mostly about split infinitives and other grammatical solecisms and why Gertrude Stein used them. Finally Lady Rothermere and Eliot rose to go and Eliot said that if he printed anything of Gertrude Stein’s in the Criterion it would have to be her very latest thing.

They left and Gertrude Stein began to write a portrait of T. S. Eliot and called it ‘The Fifteenth of November,’ that being this day, and so there could be no doubt but that it was her latest thing. It was all about wool is wool and silk is silk, or wool is woolen and silk is silken. She sent it to T. S. Eliot and he accepted it.

III

During these early restless years after the war Gertrude Stein worked a great deal. Not as in the old days, night after night, but anywhere, in between visits, in the automobile while she was waiting in the street while I did errands, while posing. She was particularly fond in these days of working in the automobile while it stood in the crowded streets.

She was much influenced by the sound of the streets and the movement of the automobiles. She also liked to set a sentence for herself as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then write to that time and tune. ‘Mildred’s Thoughts,’ published in The American Caravan, was one of the experiments she thought most successful.

It was during the winter which we spent at Saint Rémy that Gertrude Stein meditated upon the use of grammar, poetical forms, and what might be termed landscape plays.

It was at this time that she wrote ‘Elucidation,’ printed in transition in 1927. It was her first effort to state her problems of expression and her attempts to answer them. It was her first effort to realize clearly just what her writing meant and why it was as it was. It was in Saint Rémy and during this winter that she wrote the poetry that has so greatly influenced the younger generation.

She worked in those days with slow care and concentration and was very preoccupied.

This long winter in Saint Rémy broke the restlessness of the war and the after-war. A great many things were to happen, there were to be friendships and there were to be enmities and there were to be a great many other things, but there was not to be any restlessness.

IV

Gertrude Stein always says that she only has two real distractions, pictures and automobiles. Perhaps she might now add dogs.

Not long after the war her attention was attracted by the work of André Masson. Masson was at that time influenced by Juan Gris, in whom Gertrude Stein’s interest was permanent and vital. She was interested in André Masson as a painter, particularly as a painter of white, and she was interested in his compositions, in the wandering line in his compositions. But soon Masson fell under the influence of the Surréalistes.

The Surréalistes are the vulgarization of Picabia as Delaunay and his followers and the Futurists were the vulgarization of Picasso. Picabia had conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound, and that this vibration should be the result of conceiving the human form and the human face in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it. It is his way of achieving the disembodied. It was this idea that, conceived mathematically, influenced Marcel Duchamp and produced his The Nude Descending the Staircase.

All his life Picabia has struggled to dominate and achieve this conception.

Gertrude Stein thinks that perhaps he is now approaching the solution of his problem. The Surréalistes, taking the manner for the matter as is the way of the vulgarizers, accept the line as having become vibrant and as therefore able in itself to inspire them to higher flights. He who is going to be the creator of the vibrant line knows that it is not yet created, and if it were it would not exist by itself, it would be dependent upon the emotion of the object which compels the vibration. So much for the creator and his followers.

Gertrude Stein, in her work, has always been possessed by the intellectual passion for exactitude in the description of inner and outer reality. She has produced a simplification by this concentration, and as a result the destruction of associational emotion in poetry and prose. She knows that beauty, music, decoration, the result of emotion, should never be the cause; even events should not be the cause of emotion nor should they be the material of poetry and prose. Nor should emotion itself be the cause of poetry or prose. They should consist of either an outer or an inner reality.

It was this conception of exactitude that made the close understanding between Gertrude Stein and Juan Gris.

Juan Gris also conceived exactitude, but in him exactitude had a mystical basis. As a mystic it was necessary for him to be exact. In Gertrude Stein the necessity was intellectual, a pure passion for exactitude. It is because of this that her work has often been compared to that of mathematicians and by a certain French critic to the work of Bach.

Picasso, by nature the most endowed, had less clarity of intellectual purpose. He was in his creative activity dominated by Spanish ritual, later by Negro ritual expressed in Negro sculpture (which has an Arab basis, the basis also of Spanish ritual), and later by Russian ritual. His creative activity being tremendously dominant, he made these great rituals over into his own image.

Juan Gris was the only person whom Picasso wished away. The relation between them was just that.

In the days when the friendship between Gertrude Stein and Picasso had become, if possible, closer than before, her intimacy with Juan Gris displeased him. Once, after a show of Juan’s pictures at the Galerie Simon, he said to her with violence, ‘Tell me why you stand up for his work. You know you do not like it,’ and she did not answer him. Later when Juan died and Gertrude Stein was heartbroken, Picasso came to the house and spent all day there. I do not know what was said, but I do know that at one time Gertrude Stein said to him bitterly, ‘You have no right to mourn,’ and he said, ‘You have no right to say that to me.’ ‘You never realized his meaning because you did not have it,’ she said angrily. ‘You know very well I did,’ he replied.

The most moving thing Gertrude Stein has ever written is the ‘Life and Death of Juan Gris.’ It was printed in transition and later on translated into German for his retrospective show in Berlin.

Picasso never wished Braque away. Picasso said once when he and Gertrude Stein were talking together, ‘Yes, Braque and James Joyce, they are the incomprehensibles whom anybody can understand.’

V

The first thing that happened when we were back in Paris was Hemingway with a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson.

I remember very well the impression I had of Hemingway that first afternoon. He was an extraordinarily goodlooking young man, twenty-three years old. It was not long after that that everybody was twenty-six. It became the period of being twenty-six. During the next two or three years all the young men were twenty-six years old. It was the right age apparently for that time and place. There were one or two under twenty, but they did not count as Gertrude Stein carefully explained to them. If they were young men they were twenty-six. Later on, much later on, they were twenty-one and twentytwo.

So Hemingway was twenty-three, rather foreign-looking, with passionately interested, rather than interesting eyes. He sat in front of Gertrude Stein and listened and looked.

They talked then, and more and more, a great deal together. He asked her to come and spend an evening in their apartment and look at his work. Hemingway had then and has always a very good instinct for finding apartments in strange but pleasing localities and good femmes de ménage and good food. This, his first apartment, was just off the place du Tertre. We spent the evening there and he and Gertrude Stein went over all the writing he had done up to that time. He had begun the novel that it was inevitable he would begin, and there were the little poems aftenwards printed by McAlmon in the Contact Edition. Gertrude Stein rather liked the poems, they were direct, Kiplingesque, but the novel she found wanting. ‘There is a great deal of description in this,’ she said, ‘and not particularly good description. Begin over again and concentrate,’ she said.

Hemingway was at this time Paris correspondent for a Canadian newspaper. He was obliged there to express what he called the Canadian viewpoint.

He and Gertrude Stein used to walk together and talk together a great deal.

One day she said to him, ‘Look here, you say you and your wife have a little money between you. Is it enough to live on if you live quietly?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘then do it. If you keep on doing newspaper work you will never see things, you will only see words and that will not do — that is of course if you intend to be a writer.’ Hemingway said he undoubtedly intended to be a writer.

He and his wife went away on a trip, and shortly after Hemingway turned up alone. He came to the house about ten o’clock in the morning and he stayed — he stayed for lunch, he stayed all afternoon, he stayed for dinner, and he stayed until about ten o’clock at night, and then all of a sudden he announced that his wife was enceinte, and then with great bitterness, ‘And I, I am too young to be a father.’ We consoled him as best we could and sent him on his way.

When they came back Hemingway said that he had made up his mind. They would go back to America and he would work hard for a year, and with what he would earn and what they had they would settle down and he would give up newspaper work and make himself a writer. They went away, and well within the prescribed year they came back with a newborn baby. Newspaper work was over.

The first thing to do when they came back was, as they thought, to get the baby baptized. They wanted Gertrude Stein and myself to be godmothers and an English war comrade of Hemingway was to be godfather. We were all born of different religions and most of us were not practising any, so it was rather difficult to know in what church the baby could be baptized. We spent a great deal of time that winter, all of us, discussing the matter. Finally it was decided that it should be baptized Episcopalian, and Episcopalian it was.

Writer and painter godparents are notoriously unreliable. That is, there is certain before long to be a cooling of friendship. I know several cases of this. Poor Paulot Picasso’s godparents have wandered out of sight, and just as naturally it is a long time since any of us have seen or heard of our Hemingway godchild. However in the beginning we were active godparents, I particularly. In the meantime the godchild’s father was very earnestly at work making himself a writer.

Gertrude Stein never corrects any detail of anybody’s writing; she sticks strictly to general principles, the way of seeing what the writer chooses to see, and the relation between that vision and the way it gets down. When the vision is not complete the words are flat. ‘ It is very simple, there can be no mistake about it,’ so she insists. It was at this time that Hemingway began the short things that afterwards were printed in a volume called In Our Time.

VI

One day Hemingway came in very excited about Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic. Ford Madox Ford had started the Transatlantic some months before. We had heard that he was in Paris but we had not happened to meet. Gertrude Stein had however seen copies of the Transatlantic and found it interesting, but had thought nothing further about it.

Hemingway came in then very excited and said that Ford wanted something of Gertrude Stein’s for the next number and he, Hemingway, wanted The Making of Americans to be run in it as a serial and he had to have the first fifty pages at once. Gertrude Stein was of course quite overcome with her excitement at this idea, but there was no copy of the manuscript except the one that we had had bound. ‘That makes no difference,’ said Hemingway, ‘I will copy it.’ And he and I between us did copy it, and it was printed in the next number of the Transatlantic. So for the first time a piece of the monumental work which was the beginning, really the beginning of modern writing, was printed, and we were very happy.

Later on when things were difficult between Gertrude Stein and Hemingway, she always remembered with gratitude that after all it was Hemingway who first caused to be printed a piece of The Making of Americans. She always says, ‘Yes, sure, I have a weakness for Hemingway. After all he was the first of the young men to knock at my door, and he did make Ford print the first piece of The Making of Americans.’

Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson are very funny on the subject of Hemingway. The last time that Sherwood was in Paris they often talked about him. Hemingway had been formed by the two of them, and they were both a little proud and a little ashamed of the work of their minds. Hemingway had at one moment, when he had repudiated Sherwood Anderson and all his works, written him a letter in the name of American literature, which he, Hemingway, in company with his contemporaries was about to save, telling Sherwood just what he, Hemingway, thought about Sherwood’s work, and that thinking was in no sense complimentary.

As I say, Sherwood and Gertrude were endlessly amusing on the subject. What a book, they both agreed, would be the real story of Hemingway, not those he writes but the confessions of the real Ernest Hemingway. It would be for another audience than the audience Hemingway now has, but it would be very wonderful. And then they both agreed that they have a weakness for Hemingway because he is such a good pupil. ‘He is a rotten pupil,’ I protested. ‘You don’t understand,’ they both said, ‘it is so flattering to have a pupil who docs it without understanding it.’ In other words, he takes training and anybody who takes training is a favorite pupil. They both admit it to be a weakness.

Gertrude Stein added further, ‘You see he is like Derain. You remember Monsieur De Tuille said, when I did not understand why Derain was having the success he was having, that it was because he looks like a modern and he smells of the museums. And that is Hemingway, he looks like a modern and he smells of the museums. But what a story, that of the real Hem, and one he should tell himself, but alas he never will. After all, as he himself once murmured, “There is the career, the career.” ’

VII

But to come back to the events that were happening.

Hemingway did it all. He copied the manuscript and corrected the proof. Correcting proofs is, as I said before, like dusting — you learn the values of the thing as no reading suffices to teach it to you. In correcting these proofs Hemingway learned a great deal, and he admired all that he learned.

In the meantime McAlmon had printed the three poems and ten stories of Hemingway and William Bird had printed In Our Time, and Hemingway was getting to be known. He was coming to know Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and Bromfield and George Antheil and everybody else. Hemingway had become a writer.

He was also a shadow-boxer, thanks to Sherwood, and he heard about bullfighting from me. I have always loved Spanish dancing and Spanish bullfighting, and I loved to show the photograph where Gertrude Stein and I were in the front row and had our picture taken there accidentally. In these days Hemingway was teaching some young chap how to box. The boy did not know how, but by accident he knocked Hemingway out. I believe this sometimes happens. At any rate, in these days Hemingway although a sportsman was easily tired. He used to get quite worn out walking from his house to ours. But then he had been worn by the war. Even now he is, as Hélène says all men are, fragile. Recently a robust friend of his said to Gertrude Stein, ‘Ernest is very fragile. Whenever he does anything sporting something breaks his arm, his leg, or his head.’

In those early days Hemingway liked all his contemporaries except Cummings. He accused Cummings of having copied everything, not from anybody but from somebody. Gertrude Stein, who had been much impressed by The Enormous Room, said that Cummings did not copy, he was the natural heir of the New England tradition with its aridity and its sterility, but also with its individuality. They disagreed about this.

They also disagreed about Sherwood Anderson. Gertrude Stein contended that Sherwood Anderson had a genius for using the sentence to convey a direct emotion, this was in the great American tradition, and that really, except Sherwood, there was no one in America who could write a clear and passionate sentence. Hemingway did not believe this, he did not like Sherwood’s taste. ‘Taste has nothing to do with sentences,’ contended Gertrude Stein. She also added that Fitzgerald was the only one of the younger writers who wrote naturally in sentences.

Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald are very peculiar in their relation to each other. Gertrude Stein had been very much impressed by This Side of Para-dise. She read it when it came out and before she knew any of the young American writers. She said of it that it was this book that really created for the public the new generation. She has never changed her opinion about this. She thinks this equally true of The Great Gatsby. She thinks that Fitzgerald will be read when many of his well-known contemporaries are forgotten. Fitzgerald always says that he thinks Gertrude Stein says these things just to annoy him by making him think that she means them, and he adds in his favorite way, ‘And her doing it is the cruelest thing I ever heard. ’ They always however have a very good time when they meet. And the last time they met they had a good time with themselves and Hemingway.

There was also Glenway Wescott, but Glenway Wescott at no time interested Gertrude Stein. He has a certain syrup but it does not pour.

VIII

So then Hemingway’s career was begun. For a little while we saw less of him, and then he began to come again. He used to recount to Gertrude Stein the conversations that he afterwards used in The Sun Also Rises, and they talked endlessly about the character of Harold Loeb. At this time Hemingway was preparing his volume of short stories to submit to publishers in America, and one evening he turned up with the manuscript. He handed it to Gertrude Stein. He had added to his stories a little story of meditations, and in these he said that The Enormous Room was the greatest book he had ever read. It was then that Gertrude Stein said, ‘Hemingway, remarks are not literature.’

After this we did not see Hemingway for quite a while, and then we went to see someone, just after The Making ofAmericans was printed, and Hemingway, who was there, came up to Gertrude Stein and began to explain why he would not be able to write a review of the book. Just then a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and Ford Madox Ford said, ‘Young man, it is I who wish to speak to Gertrude Stein.’ Ford then said to her, ‘I wish to ask your permission to dedicate my new book to you. May I ? ’ Gertrude Stein and I were both awfully pleased and touched.

For some years after this Gertrude Stein and Hemingway did not meet. And then we heard that he was back in Paris and telling a number of people how much he wanted to see her. ‘ Don’t you come home with Hemingway on your arm,’ I used to say when she went out for a walk. Sure enough, one day she did come back bringing him with her.

They sat and talked a long time. Finally I heard her say, ‘Hemingway, after all you are ninety per cent Rotarian.’ ‘Can’t you,’ he said, ‘make it eighty per cent?’ ‘No,’ said she regretfully, ‘I can’t.’ After all, as she always says, he did and, I may say, he does have moments of disinterestedness.

It was Ford who once said of Hemingway, ‘He comes and sits at my feet and praises me. It makes me nervous.’ Hemingway also said once, ‘I turn my flame, which is a small one, down and down, and then suddenly there is a big explosion. If there were nothing but explosions, my work would be so exciting nobody could bear it. ’

However, whatever I say, Gertrude Stein always says, ‘Yes I know, but I have a weakness for Hemingway.’

IX

Just after the publication of The Making of Americans, which had been undertaken by Robert McAlmon, there was a review of Gertrude Stein’s book, Geography and Plays, in the Athenæeum signed Edith Sitwell. The review was long and a little condescending but I liked it. Gertrude Stein had not cared for it. A year later in the London Vogue was an article again by Edith Sitwell saying that since writing her article in the Athenæum she had spent the year reading nothing but Geography and Plays and she wished to say how important and beautiful a book she had found it to be.

One afternoon at Elmer Harden’s we met Miss Todd, the editor of the London Vogue. She said that Edith Sitwell was to be shortly in Paris and wanted very much to meet Gertrude Stein. She said that Edith Sitwell was very shy and hesitant about coming. Elmer Harden said he would act as escort.

I remember so well my first impression of her, an impression which indeed has never changed. Very tall, bending slightly, withdrawing and hesitatingly advancing, and beautiful with the most distinguished nose I have ever seen on any human being. At that time and in conversation between Gertrude Stein and herself afterwards, I delighted in the delicacy and completeness of her understanding of poetry. She and Gertrude Stein became friends at once. This friendship, like all friendships, has had its difficulties but I am convinced that fundamentally Gertrude Stein and Edith Sitwell are friends and enjoy being friends.

We saw a great deal of Edith Sitwell at this time and then she went back to London. In the autumn of that year, 1925, Gertrude Stein had a letter from the president of the literary society of Cambridge asking her to speak before them in the early spring. Gertrude Stein, quite completely upset at the very idea, quite promptly answered no. Immediately came a letter from Edith Sitwell saying that the no must be changed to yes; that it was of the first importance that Gertrude Stein should deliver this address, and that moreover Oxford was waiting for the yes to be given to Cambridge to ask her to do the same at Oxford.

There was very evidently nothing to do but to say yes, and so Gertrude Stein said yes.

She was very upset at the prospect. Peace, she said, had much greater terrors than war. Precipices even were nothing to this. She was very low in her mind. Luckily early in January the Ford car began to have everything the matter with it. The better garages would not pay much attention to aged Fords and Gertrude Stein used to take hers out to a shed in Montrouge where the mechanics worked at it while she sat. If she were to leave it there, there would most likely have been nothing left of it to drive away.

One cold dark afternoon she went out to sit with her Ford car and while she sat on the steps of another battered Ford watching her own being taken to pieces and put together again, she began to write. She stayed there several hours and when she came back chilled, with the Ford repaired, she had written the whole of ‘ Composition As Explanation.’

Once the lecture written, the next trouble was the reading of it. Everybody gave her advice. She read it to anybody who came to the house and some of them read it to her. Prichard happened to be in Paris just then and he and Emily Chadbourne between them gave advice and were an audience. Prichard showed her how to read it in the English manner, but Emily Chadbourne was all for the American manner and Gertrude Stein was too worried to have any manner. We went one afternoon to Natalie Barney’s. There there was a very aged and a very charming French professor of history. Natalie Barney asked him to tell Gertrude Stein how to lecture. ‘Talk as quickly as you can and never look up,’ was his advice. Prichard had said, ‘Talk as slowly as possible and never look down.’ At any rate I ordered a new dress and a new hat for Gertrude Stein, and early in the spring we went to London.

X

This was the spring of 1926. Edith Sitwell gave a party for us and so did her brother Osbert. Osbert was a great comfort to Gertrude Stein. He so thoroughly understood every possible way in which one could be nervous that as he sat beside her in the hotel telling her all the kinds of ways that he and she could suffer from stage fright she was quite soothed. She was always very fond of Osbert. She always said he was like an uncle of a king. He had that pleasant, kindly, irresponsible, agitated calm that an uncle of an English king always must have.

Finally we arrived in Cambridge in the afternoon, were given tea, and then dined with the president of the society and some of his friends. It was very pleasant and after dinner we went to the lecture room. It was a varied audience, men and women. Gertrude Stein was soon at her ease, the lecture went off very well, the men afterwards asked a great many questions and were very enthusiastic. The women said nothing. Gertrude Stein wondered whether they were supposed not to or just did not.

The day after we went to Oxford. There we lunched with young Acton and then went in to the lecture. Gertrude Stein was feeling more comfortable as a lecturer and this time she had a wonderful time. As she remarked afterwards, ‘I felt just like a prima donna.’

The lecture room was full, many standing in the back, and the discussions, after the lecture, lasted over an hour and no one left. It was very exciting. They asked all sorts of questions; they wanted to know most often why Gertrude Stein thought she was right in doing the kind of writing she did. She answered that it was not a question of what anyone thought, but after all she had been doing as she did for about twenty years and now they wanted to hear her lecture. This did not mean of course that they were coming to think that her way was a possible way, it proved nothing, but on the other hand it did possibly indicate something. They laughed.

Then up jumped one man, it turned out afterwards that he was a dean, and he said that in the ‘ Saints in Seven’ he had been very interested in the sentence about the ring around the moon, about the ring following the moon. He admitted that the sentence was one of the most beautifully balanced sentences he had ever heard, but still did the ring follow the moon? Gertrude Stein said, ‘ When you look at the moon and there is a ring around the moon and the moon moves, does not the ring follow the moon?’ ‘Perhaps it seems to,’ he replied. ‘Well, in that case,’ she said, ‘how do you know that it does not?’ He sat down. Another man, a don, next to him jumped up and asked something else. They did this several times, the two of them, jumping up one after the other. Then the first man jumped up and said, ‘You say that everything being the same, everything is always different. How can that be so?’ ‘Consider,’ she replied, ‘the two of you; you jump up one after the other, that is the same thing, and surely you admit that the two of you are always different.’ ‘ Touché,’ he said and the meeting was over. One of the men was so moved that he confided to me as we went out that the lecture had been his greatest experience since he had read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Edith Sitwell, Osbert, and Sacheverell were all present and were all delighted. They were delighted with the lecture and they were delighted with the good-humored way in which Gertrude Stein had gotten the best of the hecklers. Edith Sitwell said that Sache chuckled about it all the way home.

The next day we returned to Paris. The Sitwells wanted us to stay and be interviewed and generally go on with it, but Gertrude Stein felt that she had had enough of glory and excitement. Not, as she always explains, that she could ever have enough of glory. After all, as she always contends, no artist needs criticism, he only needs appreciation. If he needs criticism he is no artist.

Leonard Woolf some months after this published ‘Composition As Explanation ’ in the Hogarth Essay Series. It was also printed in the Dial.

XI

Mildred Aldrich was awfully pleased at Gertrude Stein’s English success. We went out to see her on our return and she had to have the lecture read to her again and to hear every detail of the whole experience.

Mildred Aldrich was falling upon bad days. Her annuity suddenly ceased and for a long time we did not know it. One day Dawson Johnston, the librarian of the American Library, told Gertrude Stein that Miss Aldrich had written to him to come out and get all her books as she would soon be leaving her home. We went out immediately and Mildred told us that her annuity had been stopped. It seems it was an annuity given by a woman who had fallen into her dotage and she one morning told her lawyer to cut off all the annuities that she had given for many years to a number of people.

Gertrude Stein told Mildred not to worry. The Carnegie Fund, approached by Kate Buss, sent five hundred dollars, William Cook gave Gertrude Stein a blank check to supply all deficiencies, another friend of Mildred’s from Providence, Rhode Island, came forward generously, and the Atlantic Monthly started a fund. Very soon Mildred Aldrich was safe. She said ruefully to Gertrude Stein, ‘You would not let me go elegantly to the poorhouse and I would have gone elegantly, but you have turned this into a poorhouse and I am the sole inmate.’ Gertrude Stein comforted her and said that she could be just as elegant in her solitary state. ‘After all,’ Gertrude Stein used to say to her, ‘Mildred, nobody can say that you have not had a good run for your money.’ Mildred Aldrich’s last years were safe.

As I remember, during that winter and the next we gave a great many parties. We gave a tea party for the Sitwells.

Carl Van Vechten sent us quantities of Negroes; besides there were the Negroes of our neighbor, Mrs. Regan, who had brought Josephine Baker to Paris. Carl sent us Paul Robeson. Paul Robeson interested Gertrude Stein. He knew American values and American life as only one in it but not of it could know them. And yet as soon as any other person came into the room he became definitely a Negro. Gertrude Stein did not like hearing him sing spirituals. ‘They do not belong to you any more than anything else, so why claim them?’ she said, He did not answer.

Once a Southern woman, a very charming Southern woman, was there, and she said to him, ‘Where were you born?’ and he answered, ‘In New Jersey,’ and she said, ‘Not in the South, what a pity,’ and he said, ‘Not for me.’

Gertrude Stein concluded that Negroes were not suffering from persecution, they were suffering from nothingness. She always contends that the African is not primitive; he has a very ancient but a very narrow culture, and there it remains. Consequently nothing does or can happen.

One day Gertrude Stein came home from a walk to the bank and bringing out a card from her pocket said, ‘We are lunching to-morrow with the Bromfields.’ Way back in the Hemingway days Gertrude Stein had met Louis Bromfield and his wife, and then from time to time there had been a slight acquaintance; there had even been a slight acquaintance with Bromfield’s sister, and now suddenly we were lunching with the Bromfields. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because,’ answered Gertrude Stein, ‘he knows all about gardens.’

We lunched with the Bromfields and he does know all about gardens and all about flowers and all about soils. Gertrude Stein and he first liked each other as gardeners, then they liked each other as Americans, and then they liked each other as writers.

Gertrude Stein always says of him that he is as American as Janet Scudder, as American as a doughboy, but not as solemn. His highland Scotch blood makes him sensitive and sad and gay, and so his subtlety can express itself, it does not only exist. And beside all that there is abundance. Gertrude Stein dislikes sterility even when there is genius with it. It is one of the things that afflicts her in the postwar generation. They tend to be unproductive or produce only with great rarity. She says of Bromfield, ‘It comes, he can keep on, he does keep on, he will keep on, and keeping on he will become not dull but alive.’

XII

For some time now many people, and publishers, have been asking Gertrude Stein to write her autobiography and she had always replied, ‘Not possibly.’

She began to tease me and say that I should write my autobiography. ‘Just think,’ she would say, ‘what a lot of money you would make.’ She then began to invent titles for my autobiography — My Life with the Great, Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With, My Twenty-five Years with Gertrude Stein.

Then she began to get serious and say, ‘But really, seriously, you ought to write your autobiography.’ Finally I promised that if during the summer I could find time I would write my autobiography.

When Ford Madox Ford was editing the Transatlantic Review he once said to Gertrude Stein, ‘I am a pretty good writer and a pretty good editor and a pretty good business man, but I find it very difficult to be all three at once.’ I am a pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs, and I have to do them all at once and I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author.

About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, ‘It does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do? I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe.’

And she has, and this is it.

(The End)