Apparently
the first person to introduce “gay” as a synonym for “homosexual,” Gertrude
Stein used the word 136 times in a 1922 prose poem called “Miss Furr and Miss
Skeene,” about a pair of Lesbian lovers. Stein also wrote novels, poems,
libretti, essays, and what-have-you in a whimsical, enigmatic style that left
most of her readers scratching their heads in puzzlement. “A rose is a rose is
a rose” became one of her best-known and least understood quotations.
Born
February 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Gertrude lived as an infant in Vienna and
Paris with her wealthy parents, who then moved to Oakland, California, where
Gertrude grew up, and of which she famously wrote in her autobiography, “When
you get there, there’s no there there.”
After her parents’ death, she was raised by her mother’s family in
Baltimore. She attended Radcliffe
College, where she was a student of philosopher-psychologist Willliam James. When
she sat to write her final exam in his course, she felt tired, having been
to the opera the previous evening. She wrote on her paper, "I am so sorry
but I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy
today." James replied by
postcard, “I
understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself." He gave
her the highest mark in the course.
Stein also briefly attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, where she had
her first Lesbian affair.
In 1903
Gertrude and her brother Leo moved to Paris and shared an apartment at 27 rue
de Fleurus on the Left Bank near Luxembourg Gardens. She began to write, and the
two of them accumulated works by young artists, amassing a valuable collection
by Picasso, Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Daumier, and
others. The siblings bitterly separated in
1914, Leo taking sixteen Renoirs and one Picasso, and leaving the rest of the
art to Gertrude. The two met only once again, years later in a chance encounter
on a Paris street.
Stein
and her life partner, Alice B. Toklas, who had been together since 1907, maintained their household until Stein’s death in 1946. Decidedly
unconventional—in literary style, political affiliation, and domestic
arrangements—Stein presided over a long-running salon on Saturday nights that
regularly attracted Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson,
Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, Ford Madox Ford,
Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Virgil Thomson, Paul Robeson, and other leading
cultural lions. While Gertrude conversed on lofty subjects with the visiting
literati, mostly men, Alice entertained their wives and girlfriends in a
separate room. Stein once told Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation,” and
she is credited with originating that description of the American expatriate
writers of the day.
Gertrude
and Alice’s relationship was immortalized in Stein’s memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
which was published in 1933 and became a best-seller. Although Jewish by birth,
Stein was sometimes accused of anti-Semitism during Hitler’s rise to power in
the 1930s, and in the Second World War she collaborated with France’s pro-Nazi
Vichy government. She was an admirer of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who headed the
Vichy regime, and continued to praise him after the war, when he had been
declared a traitor.
Stomach
troubles had plagued Stein for many years, and in the summer of 1946 she was
diagnosed with stomach cancer.
Doctors believed the cancer too far advanced to operate, but Stein
insisted on having surgery anyway, and it was scheduled for July 27 at the
American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb.
Alice
and Stein’s nephew and niece were at her bedside as she was prepared for the
operation. Feeling the effects of the pre-op drugs, she sleepily asked, “What
is the answer?” No one responded. “In that case,” said Stein, “what is the question?” Those were last words; she lapsed into
a coma following surgery and died at 6:30 p.m. at the age of
seventy-two. She is buried in Père
Lachaise Cemetery.
Photo by Carl Van Vechten.
