# And now

## And so the time comes when I can tell the story of my life

BY GERTRUDE STEIN

Editor's Note: The year 1933-34 proved to be Gertrude Stein's *annus mirabilis*. When her life story, *The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas*, was published last September, following serialization in *The Atlantic Monthly*, it was chosen by the Literary Guild, thus insuring it a wider audience than either author or publisher ever expected: it is now about to go into its fifth large printing. Then came the production of the Stein-Thomson opera, *Four Saints in Three Acts*, which, during its month's run in New York, became the talk of the town, for one reason or another; was re-opened by popular demand for an additional fort-night; and is to go on tour this autumn. At that time, too, Miss Stein is to visit the United States, after thirty years of residence in Paris, to deliver a series of lectures at various universities. She has nearly finished a new volume of reminiscences.

*Vanity Fair* views all this with a certain smugness, for it has been publishing Miss Stein's work at various times for seventeen years. Her first contribution, in 1917, was called *Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled*, and was said to be a portrait of Henry McBride, the New York art critic. A year later *Vanity Fair* published her poem, *The Great American Army*; and in 1923 her portrait of Jo Davidson; and a short story, *Miss Furr and Miss Skeene*; in 1924 *If I Told Him*, a portrait of Picasso.

In the following article (which is written in a not too difficult style) Miss Stein tells us her reactions to her popular success.

* The other book was gay, this one will not be so gay. The other had peace and war. This one has peace and only peace and so it is not going to be so gay. It is going to be rather sad. When there has been a long peace after there had been a long war, there is a monotone and something of a moan. That is where we are to-day. There is a great deal to say about where we are to-day and what is happening every day.

What happened from the day I wrote the autobiography to to-day and what do I think about it all, about what happened every day.

I make my bow.

I have always quarreled with a great many young men and one of the principal things that I have quarreled with them about was that once they had made a success they became sterile, they could not go on. And I blamed them. I said it was their fault. I said success is all right but if there is anything in you it ought not to cut off the flow not if there is anything in you. Now I know better. It does cut off your flow and then if you are not too young and you are frightened enough you can begin again but if you are young or if you were young when you succeeded then when you get frightened it makes it worse not better.

That is the advantage of being older

when you get frightened it starts you going, when you are young and you get frightened it just stops you more than ever. Just think of animals and children and you will understand.

What happened to me was this. When the success began and it was a success I got lost completely lost. You know the nursery rhyme, I am I because my little dog knows me. Well you see I did not know myself, I lost my personality. It has always been completely included in myself my personality as any personality naturally is, and here all of a sudden, I was not just I because so many people did know me. It was just the opposite of I am I because my little dog knows me. So many people knowing me I was I no longer and for the first time since I had begun to write I could not write and what was worse I could not worry about not writing and what was also worse I began to think about how my writing would sound to others, how could I make them understand, I who had always lived within myself and my writing. And then all of a sudden I said there that it is that is what was the matter with all of them all the young men whose syrup did not pour, and here I am being just the same. They were young and I am not but when it happens it is just the same, the syrup does not pour.

It did not frighten me, I was enjoying myself. I was spending my money as they had spent their money all the other

painters and writers that I had blamed and condemned and here I was doing the same thing. And then the dollar fell and somehow I got frightened, really frightened awfully frightened just as all of them had gotten frightened really frightened these last years, but luckily for me being older the fright has made me write. I say luckily for me because I like to write. It is what I like best. I like it even better than spending money although there is no pleasure so sweet as the pleasure of spending money but the pleasure of writing is longer. There is no denying that.

* All this is to introduce what happened since the writing of the autobiography and a great many things have happened.

In the first place Picasso and I are no longer friends. All the writers about whom I wrote wrote to me that they liked what I wrote but none of the painters. The painters did not like what I wrote about them, they none of them did. They just, as Henry McBride afterward told me that Matisse did, they shuddered.

I remember when there was the first big show at the autumn salon, I imagine about 1905, of Cézanne, his really first serious public recognition, they told the story that he was so moved he said he would now have to paint more carefully than ever. And then he painted those last pictures of his that were more than ever covered over painted and painted over. Perhaps it is like that.

But to tell it all just as it had happened because of course a great deal has happened not only to me and to everybody I knew but to (Continued on page 65)

GERTRUDE STEIN'S STUDIO ON THE RUE DE FLEURUS IN PARIS

35

# The street

## A SHORT STORY BY ALLAN SEAGER

■ "Yes, it's spring all right. The big elm is just turning green. Looks like a green mist over the boughs. And the hunch-backed old lady is digging and raking at that patch of lawn in front of her house."

It was spring now. For three months he had not seen a tree, lying there in the clean bare room. But Whitaker, in the bed by the window could see the street below. He was always talking, as he was talking now, about the old lady, about the first green shoots and foliage, and about the little typist—he said she was a typist and pretty too—who passed every morning and evening. All day long he lay there, sick and still, staring at the grey wall and listening enviously to Whitaker. His vision of the street he could not see grew like a mosaic on the wall. Every day Whitaker gave him something new—a dog-fight or a householder smoking in his garden. These he would insert carefully into the whole and trim and polish until the wall almost became a window through which he too could see the street.

■ There was nothing else to do but listen.

Books had grown stale and reading hurt his eyes. When his friends came to visit him they said always the same thing. Of course he was not feeling better. Didn't they understand that tuberculosis was not like the colic? One didn't get well over night. The only thing was to lie and contemplate one's navel and wonder how the trees looked in the street outside.

He wished he had the bed by the window instead of Whitaker. Then he could look out and watch not only the leaves unfurl and the flowers spring up but the people in the street as well. If he could see them coming and going, it would be quite easy for him to feel himself a part of things again. Besides, he thought, Whitaker preened himself on having such a fine place, though God knows there was no reason why he should. The doctor had assigned the beds. And Whitaker had begun to use what seemed a superior tone, as if one could not understand what a motor or a hand-organ was, or even a tree. He was certain it was a superior tone. As if one were a child. Yes, it was clear that Whitaker held one end of the thread that led back into what he was coming to call "life." And he was coming to hate Whitaker because he held it. At first he was astonished at his own baseness. He had always regarded himself as a decent fellow. He did not know that confinement and disease can taint decency. "Silly nonsense. It is all real-

ly beneath my notice. I am thirty years old. I am a man and men do not—" The naïveté of the process disgusted him but he went through it like a rosary every day for a while and sometimes he was polite to Whitaker afterward. As the days went by, all alike, he hated Whitaker simply and did not think about the baseness.

Whitaker's heart attacks evened things up. They were the price he paid for the best bed. It was quite reasonable. One could not have everything gratis. Sometimes in the night Whitaker would sit upright in the bed choking and panting. His heart would beat two hundred to the minute. It was very hard to get enough air into his rotting lungs. At the first movement he would be sharp awake and he would watch Whitaker's shoulders heave and his head jerk. Then with a feeling of condescension he would press the button to call the night nurse. Usually she could relieve Whitaker but often when it was very bad, doctors would be called. They came partly dressed and yawning. They would lean over Whitaker in the dark room and talk in low voices. The paroxysms were dangerous when they went on too long, for both his lungs were partly collapsed, and if his heart were not slowed down, he might die for lack of air. Resting on his elbow in the far bed, he would watch with secret satisfaction as if justice were being done. Even in the night when he was waked from sleeping, he was angry with Whitaker.

■ All through the hot summer when the empty days sped quickly by the window, the anger grew and festered in him like a sore he could not leave alone. His rare spasms of remorse were short and his thoughts returned to it with a kind of maddening gravity. He would recite to himself, like an old tale from a story-book, the walking tour in Brittany or his battle with the trout, but just as he was ready with the net, had got a firm footing in the swirling water, Whitaker would begin about some children in the street and he would be snatched back to be hot and sick again in his cursed narrow room. "Twisting the knife," he thought bitterly. He was sure Whitaker knew it hurt always to hear about the street and never to see.

At dusk his fever rose and as the room grew dim his head ached and the daytime clarity vanished. When he looked at the pale oblong of the window, it seemed to him a gateway and beyond it were all the joy and brightness he had been forced to forsake. If he could only stand by the gate

and look out—but no, there was Whitaker, like a demon guarding the way. It was the gateway to life, and in the darkness Whitaker's gaunt face began to assume the shape and hollows of a skull. He was Death of course. Echoes and memories of the church arose in his mind, confusing him. Phrases about Death and Life, solemn and distorted, he remembered from hymns and prayer-books. If he could vanquish Death, why, he would be granted everlasting Life.

"The little typist just passed. She's got a posie."

"And you would kill her if you had the chance, just as you would kill me," he would mutter (Continued on page 62)

## LA LAVANDIÈRE. PAINTING BY HONORÉ DAUMIER IN VANITY FAIR'S SERIES OF MODERN PAINTERS. NO. 16

NOTE: This painting is the sixteenth to be reproduced in our color portfolio of contemporary French masters. The series has already included pictures by David, Manet, Corot, Renoir, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Degas, Gauguin, Rouault, Picasso, Matisse, Derain, Redon, Rousseau and Seurat.

■ HONORÉ VICTORIN DAUMIER suffered the cheerless fate of becoming famous only after his death. The son of a glass-painter, he was born in Marseilles in 1808, and moved to Paris in 1823, where his extraordinary talent for caricature was shown in his first lithograph in *La Caricature*, 1831. In 1832, he was jailed for a virulent cartoon of King Louis Philippe. All his life he made a meagre living for himself through his lithographs, which he regarded as the merest hackwork; for his real passion was painting, and as a painter he enjoyed no popular success whatsoever. At the age of 69, his eyesight failing him, he retired to the country cottage which Corot had given him, and died there two years later, an obscure and poverty-stricken man. The *Lavandière* ("The Laundress," in America), painted in 1861, is in the Lizzie P. Bliss Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Daumier's painting is marked by the powerful construction of his painted figures, the dramatic qualities of his lighting, the extreme simplicity of his composition, and, finally, his profound feeling for human dignity and pathos

36

SEPTEMBER, 1934

65

## And now

(Continued from page 35)

everything else. Once more Paris is not as it was.

When Picabia came to see us in the country he told me that there had been three young Spaniards who showed their pictures in 1904 and 1905 at a small furniture shop at Montmartre. The other two were Picasso and the unknown, the one who did the café and the one everybody has forgotten, and the third was himself Picabia. They were to have another show together the following winter but by that time Picasso and we had discovered each other and they did not have their show together. This is what Picabia told me and I was very surprised as at that time I never heard of Picabia.

When he was younger and young Picabia was very Spanish or rather very Cuban. He had the rather boring quality of the Cubans that mixture that one finds also in the South Americans of the old civilization that has not become new and the new civilization that never becomes new. Therein very different from Northern America which is all new, the old gets lost before it becomes new because the new is always becoming new.

Picabia now has lost a great deal of the Cuban. His grandfather was of course extremely French. He told us a nice story the other day. He never sees his French cousins any more although he has quantities of them but they all, he and the French cousins, do from time to time go to see the old concierges, janitors, Alsatians, who were caretakers for his grandfather and they ask the news about each other, and what, said they all to the concierge, is Picabia like now, they were all interested because he had just been given the legion of honor and a picture of his had just been accepted by the Luxembourg, and what, said Picabia to the concierge, did you answer when they asked you. Why I said exactly like his grandfather. And that is the true story of something that has been important in painting.

There was another funny photographic link. In those early days a photographer came to Paris and knew us all. He was Steichen. He had been one of Steiglitz' men and came over very excited about photography. Pretty soon he decided that ordinary painting did not interest him, one could do all that with photography, that is to say that the photographs of pictures looked just like the photographs of real landscapes or of still lives if they were good pictures, and so there must be something else and so he became very interested in modern painting and was one of those who told Steiglitz and the rest of them all about it.

One other funny thing happened at that time that I had forgotten all about and was reminded by a very nice letter from Lee Simonson. In those early days Simonson very young and very New York came to Paris. At Harvard he had been defending Monet and he came to Paris intending to carry on the crusade. He came to a Paris where there was no Monet to defend. Of course there was no Monet to defend. He was very upset by this but we all liked him because he told it to us.

Another thing in a little later than

those days, in fact just after the war. Janet Scudder was getting tired of sculpture, she wanted to be a painter and paint. She said she always had wanted to be a painter and now the time had come. So she painted some pictures and wanted to send them to the new spring salon. There is a rule at the spring salon that a member of one cannot exhibit at another and Janet was a member of the old spring salon and so she could not exhibit at the new and she suggested to Alice B. Toklas that she Janet would exhibit under her name and Alice was amused and consented. Of course no one else was told anything about it. The picture was accepted and hung and we went over to look at it and brought home a catalogue. That evening Picas-so came to the house. I showed him the catalogue. What he said, she has always painted and I never knew it. No I said she had never painted before she just painted this one picture and sent it to the salon and it was accepted. It is not possible he said angrily, it is not possible. Nobody who has never drawn or painted a picture can paint a first picture and send it to any salon and have it accepted, it is not possible. But there you are, I said. It is not possible he answered stubbornly. He was terribly upset. He said that would upset everything if it were possible. The salons may not be great painting but you have to have a technique to pass the jury and if you never painted before it is not possible. He was so upset that I began to laugh. What is the story he demanded. I told him and he was so relieved. I knew he said that it was not possible. It just could not be possible otherwise nothing would have any meaning.

Even now A. B. Toklas gets catalogues of paints sent to her faithfully by art shops in hopes that she will yet paint another picture.

But now, Paris has changed and I have changed and I am no longer frightened and I will just as well change again but at present it is all very changed.

I write the way I used to write in The Making of Americans. I wander around. I come home and I write, I write in one copy-book and I copy what I write into another copy-book and I write and I write. Just at present I write about American religion and Grant, Ulysses Simpson Grant, and I have come back to write the way I used to write and this is because now everything that is happening is once more happening inside, there is no use in the outside, if you see the outside you see just what you look at and that is no longer interesting, everybody says so or at least everybody acts so and they are right because now there is no use in looking at anything. If it is going to change it is of no interest and if it is not going to change it is of no interest and so what is the use of looking, everything you see is what nobody looks at and so just as so long ago everything went on inside now everything goes on inside. Incidentally, there is a new young painter and when I know more about him I will tell about him.

And so the time comes when I can tell the history of my life.

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## Thoughts on the theatre abroad

(Continued from page 46)

of the old boys magnanimously turning their young wives over to the younger Gastons with sad shakes of the head and even sadder philosophical animadversions upon the even still sadder fact that age must ever be defeated by youth in the lists of love.

Nor does the English stage, in its other nine-tenths, offer the American critic of any experience much greater prognosticating difficulty. He knows that he is bound to descrew at least two or three productions of Shakespearean plays sponsored by former and somewhat antiquated London dramatic critics who believe that the defects of the productions in the way of acting can be concealed by the simple expedient of staging them out of doors, where the audiences, if any, will be distracted by the loud twittering of birds and the bites of insects. He knows, also, that he will find at least three comedies, generally adaptations from the French or Spanish, in which English actor-managers past their sixteenth birthday will present themselves as pertinacious old beaux who embarrass and confound their sons and nephews with their excessive spryness and virtuality in the arts of amor; one or two plays dealing with British schoolboy life or with the life of the teachers, in which the leading woman will have a wistful affair with the youthful hero, who wistfully won't know what it is all about; and three plays written by elderly spinsters in which the heroine, an elderly spinster,

enjoys a rapturous hour of love with the handsome young hero this name in all likelihood Robin) either on a Tyrolean hill-side or in a Scotch stone quarry, or some other such fancied romantic if damned uncomfortable place.

Then, in addition, there are sure to be several imitations of Chekhov by London playwrights just graduated from their teens, in which the repressed young wife of the master of the house, a bastard if ever there was one, will at the conclusion of the second act throw herself passionately into the arms of any male character who can play the piano, provided only he was gassed in the war; Ruth Draper; a couple of revivals of the less interesting plays of Galsworthy and Granville-Barker; two plays dealing either with the life of an actress or a ballet dancer which will give the leading woman an opportunity to run the gamut of age from nineteen to ninety and which will display her at the end, despite her valetudinarian makeup, as full of the old pep as Mae West; an assortment of mystery and detective plays that differ from their American kind only in the somewhat more precise English speech of the dick's; and at least one play in which some hero of American history like Lincoln, Robert E. Lee or John Brown will, in the British handling, be quite indistinguishable from Sir Thomas Beecham or Mr. Cyril Maude.

And so, too, with the other countries.

## Frenchwomen never say die

(Continued from page 58)

Venus, Ninon was responsible for only one suicide, and that involuntarily. She had supped one night at the Cabaret du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine with a young man whom she did not know, the young Villarceau. He blew out his brains the next morning, on discovering that his companion of the night before had been his own mother. There is, in this terrible drama, a brutal, incongruous element which wars with what we know of the famous courtesan's life, flowing serenely along through music, conversation and love.

"Women who have been prodigal of their charms," said Méré, "will never turn into pedants." Ninon, who saw to it that her lovers dined and wined magnificently, ate frugally and drank only water, to preserve that elegance of figure and ravishing freshness of skin which enabled her to the day of her death to wear the most difficult shades of red and yellow. Her bedchamber was a nest of brocaded satins, damasks and peluches, where stood an immense bed, soft, yielding, sturdy and discreet, holding up, on its oaken base, its carved pillars, and crowned by a canopy à la duchesse.

No, to such a Frenchwoman as Ninon, love is not a duel with poisoned arrows; a snare; a swindle; a Slaughterer of Innocents. It is Cytherea, a harmonious isle where are cultivated all pleasures. To believe that love à la française can be accomplished with a few easily acquired tactics is as childish a notion as to imagine that a few recipes constitute the whole of French cooking.

And, to such Frenchwomen as Misinguett and Cécile Sorel, the art of living to a beautiful and active old age might be likened to a form of athletics: with death a weight, and the winner the one who can throw it farthest.

Why shouldn't we French think in terms of years, since you Americans think in terms of skyscraper stories? You admire the Empire State building; we admire Sorel. France is, after all, an ancient, skeptical and conservative country. The whole world, moreover, has stopped believing in progress. If you Americans hadn't, would you have produced such films as *Cavalcade* and *Little Women*—remembrances of things past, as Marcel Proust would say? Yes, all signs indicate that you, too, are turning back to the past, back to your ancestors. Even in Hollywood, the screen maidens this year have had to dress up in their grandmother's clothes—like Mae West to win applause.

France is a conservatory, a museum, a cellar in which the best vintages are the oldest. It is not her business to give the world daily surprises, like America, or dangerous experiments, like Germany. You will admit that, when you take the steamer for Havre or Cherbourg, you would be frightfully disillusioned if you heard that Misinguett was no longer playing at the Folies-Bergère, or that Sorel had left the Casino de Paris and retired to a convent.