A Chance Meeting, page 14
“Certainly” was always one of Gertrude Stein’s favorite words, and one she frequently used to contradict itself—the piece on Matisse also included the line “some were certain that he was not greatly expressing this thing.” Gertrude Stein loved paradox; she liked work about which people were simultaneously certain that it was great and certain that it was awful, though about her own work she brooked no uncertainty. Leo Stein was also in the business of indexing his certainty, which was part of the reason he found William James’s work so troubling and so important, for in these matters Leo Stein was a doubter and a worrier and Gertrude Stein was a steamroller.
Part of the reason Stein felt liberated by her relationship with Alice Toklas was that Alice Toklas was certain. In her own autobiography, What Is Remembered, Toklas said of their first meeting that Stein “held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then.” Stein’s voice was “deep, full, velvety like a great contralto’s, like two voices,” and “she was large and heavy with delicate small hands and a beautifully modeled and unique head.” Stein mentioned in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas a particular trait of Toklas’s: she had a sort of little interior bell that went off in the presence of genius. It had only ever gone off three times: for Picasso, for Alfred Whitehead, and, supremely satisfyingly, for Gertrude Stein.
Picasso’s unflagging certainty may have been what initially attracted both Steins to him and what made him later impossible for Leo Stein and necessary for Gertrude Stein. But in 1909, when Steichen brought Stieglitz to visit, they were all pretty sure about Picasso, and they convinced the up-until-that-point-unconvinced Stieglitz. The flow of certainty at 27, rue de Fleurus was, in fact, very like that which emanated from Stieglitz at 291. The Steins and Stieglitz, Jewish German-American sons and daughters of clothing merchants, did much to sustain the avant-garde in Paris and in New York. Two years later, in 1911, after he had returned home, Stieglitz did the first solo Picasso show in America at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. Stieglitz offered the whole show, eighty-three drawings, watercolors, and etchings, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for two thousand dollars, but the museum turned him down. Stieglitz liked and purchased a cubist drawing from 1910 whose form he felt was reminiscent of his photograph Spring Showers (1900), an image of a tree surrounded by a metal fence, a street sweeper cleaning behind. In the end, as was not unusual for shows at 291, Stieglitz bought one of two pictures sold.
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That afternoon, when Leo Stein had finished talking, Stieglitz and Steichen left the rue de Fleurus and took a cab. Stieglitz was exhilarated; Steichen was worried. Leo Stein had denigrated Rodin and Whistler and hadn’t even mentioned Steichen’s painting, which Steichen felt left him nowhere. In Stieglitz’s account of this conversation, Steichen said, “I would rather have you and Stein approve of my work than any other people in the world.” Stieglitz, impatient with Steichen’s insecurity, said, “Do you paint for yourself or to please others? What has Stein, or what have I, to do with your paintings?” Maybe Stieglitz was a little harsher with Steichen after having been with the Steins; the Steins’ certainty might have abashed the older photographer, too.
Steichen never fully understood how Stieglitz and the Steins could be so uncompromising. Just before the beginning of the Great War, Leo Stein moved out of the rue de Fleurus and went to Italy, a defection for which Gertrude Stein could not forgive him. When he left, he took the Renoirs and left the Picassos, an arrangement that suited them both; they argued over Cézanne’s apples. Later, Leo Stein wrote at least two letters attempting a rapprochement, but Gertrude Stein never replied. Both Steins were in Europe for the whole of the Second World War, spared the concentration camps by age, American citizenship, the goodwill of collaborators, and blind luck. Even after the war, they didn’t write; each checked with a cousin to see if the other had survived.
The day that Stieglitz visited, the air at the rue de Fleurus must have fairly quivered with judgment and finality; even the paintings would have throbbed with it. Stieglitz preferred not to revisit certainties. Perhaps that’s why he never went back to the rue de Fleurus. In 1911, when he was in Paris again, he turned down an invitation to a Saturday evening there. He told Steichen that he didn’t want to change his memory of that afternoon in a single particular.
15. CARL VAN VECHTEN AND GERTRUDE STEIN
THE FIRST performance of The Rite of Spring was a scandal and an outrage and a revelation. The Ballets Russes, directed by Diaghilev, with choreography by Nijinsky, danced to the dissonant new music of Stravinsky. People screamed and whistled, ladies slapped men’s faces, canes crashed down on top hats, men exchanged cards for fights later in dark streets, and people leaned out of balconies and cheered their approval. It was an unmitigated success and failure. Naturally, the news went around Paris like wildfire. Naturally, the Parisian avant-garde was immediately mobilized. Naturally, anyone who hadn’t been at the first performance went, on June 2, 1913, to the second.
Carl Van Vechten had been writing dance reviews for The New York Times for the preceding four years. Dance had not been a field of criticism when he arrived at the paper, but he and John Martin and Edward Denby and later Lincoln Kirstein turned it into one. Van Vechten understood right away the value of work other people thought undeniably crazy. Visiting Paris, he had instantly been smitten with the Russian ballet, he was not disturbed by the “indecent” sensuality of its costuming and choreography, and he rhapsodized on the genius of Nijinsky: “The greatest of stage artists (and I include all concert musicians as well as opera singers and actors in this sweeping statement). I mean by this that he communicates more of beauty and emotion to me as a spectator than other interpretive artists do.” Van Vechten later would be known for throwing the best parties in New York, liked to be amused, admired his friends, soused and sober, was hard to shock, barked to show enthusiasm, was the first man in New York to wear a wristwatch in public, and had been known to bite people whom he liked and didn’t like. He wouldn’t have missed The Rite of Spring for the world.
The way he told the story, when he walked into his box that night, wearing a shirt of the kind he affected, with dozens of small pleats down the front, and seated himself in the second row, there were three women already occupying the first row of seats. He sat next to an unprepossessing young man, looked out over the full house, noted that the murmur of voices was louder and more intense than usual, and waited, eagerly, for the curtain to rise. The instant the music began, people were screaming and moaning and cheering. Nijinsky stood on a chair backstage, calling out the beats so that the dancers could stay together; they danced, as Van Vechten later wrote, “in time to music they had to imagine they heard and beautifully out of rhythm with the uproar in the auditorium.” The music was audible only in the occasional lull in the brawling, and, as the dancers proceeded toward the ritual sacrifice of one of their number, the audience got more and more uncomfortable. Van Vechten, entranced by what little he could hear, was carried away by the rhythmic blasting of the Stravinsky score, and it was some minutes before he realized that his youthful neighbor had stood up and, in time with the drums, was pounding on Van Vechten’s head. Van Vechten turned, the young man looked down at his hands, apologized profusely, and sat down. The caterwauling continued, while Van Vechten split his gloves applauding. Perhaps he bowed to the ladies with whom he had shared the tumult as they left their box.
Carl Van Vechten, self-portrait, 1933.
Two of these ladies were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that she had been so taken with this man and his gorgeous shirt and so stimulated by the performance that when she and Toklas returned to their house at 27, rue de Fleurus, she immediately sat down and wrote, late into the night, a word portrait of the gentleman in his fine shirt, called “One,” the second section of which, “Two,” gave, when read out loud, the sense of sitting almost touching someone in the midst of a most physical performance:
Two.
A touching white shining sash and a touching white green undercoat and a touching white colored orange and a touching piece of elastic. A touching piece of elastic suddenly.
A touching white inlined ruddy hurry, a touching research in all may day. A touching research is an over show.
A touching expartition is in an example of work, a touching beat is in the best way. . . .
A touching box is on the touching so helping held.
Two.
Any left in the touch is a scene, a scene. Any left in is left somehow.
In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein reported that she and Toklas were then pleased and surprised when, a few days later, with a nice letter of introduction, who should turn up at their door but that very man, Carl Van Vechten.
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They did go to The Rite of Spring, and they did sit in the same box by coincidence, but in telling the story they changed at least one important detail. Actually, they had already met, Carl Van Vechten having dined at the rue de Fleurus a few evenings before. The three had found one another sympathetic, and Van Vechten had looked at all the paintings and listened very attentively and gone home and written his beloved, who was later his wife, Fania Marinoff, a letter about how much he liked Gertrude Stein. Van Vechten, writing about it later, claimed, in two separate publications, that it had been the first performance. In fact he had bought his ticket before any of the ruckus and only went on the second night because the first was already sold out. He guessed that his reputation for discovering the new was better served by the legend of the opening night battle, and this proved true; his attendance at the first performance was referred to by his contemporaries as evidence of his clairvoyant taste. For her part, Stein was delighted by his published version, and his representation of three women, unknown to him, who sat with him in the box. He wrote back pleased that she had noticed that he had cut out a number of members of their party altogether: “It’s so amusing of you to notice that I wrote there were Three in the box” and added that “it wasn’t the first night of Sacre either, it was the second night. But one must only be accurate about such details in a work of fiction.” In 1932, in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein made the deception even more elaborate, keeping the fiction of a box full of strangers but returning the occasion to the second performance and adding the details of the shirt and of coming home that night to write the word portrait. They loved gossip, Stein and Van Vechten, and secrets and private languages and mystical repetition and numbers and serendipity, and their transformed anecdote satisfied them in every regard.
Carl Van Vechten thought that all great art was intimate. He was one of the first to see this quality in Gertrude Stein’s work—the feeling that it had, particularly when read out loud, of being something that he would say to himself in his most interior speech. He showed up at her door having read and liked Three Lives and her portraits of Matisse, Picasso, and Mabel Dodge, which very few people knew at that time. Van Vechten did not miss what his acquaintance Alfred Stieglitz was publishing in Camera Work. He thought them great works, and he told Stein so in gratifying detail. After he met Stein he read her work with her voice in his head and liked this better still. In an introduction to Three Lives written in 1933, he said:
The voice is a warm caress and it would not be necessary to understand what Gertrude Stein was saying—at all times she speaks clearly and with intention—to appreciate the beauty of this voice. I first heard the celebrated voix d’or of Sarah Bernhardt in 1896 before it had lost its metallic resonant glamour, but I do not think even Sarah’s voice was as deeply rich in quality as the voice of Gertrude Stein.
Van Vechten said that great art had imagination, vitality, and glamour; in the words of Gertrude Stein he found all three.
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Gertrude Stein had had a private language with her brother Leo; he left as she was developing a language of her own, one shared with Alice B. Toklas. Stein said that she wrote for herself and for strangers, and later, as Van Vechten noted, she “withdrew the strangers.” Mostly, she wrote for a few people familiar with the particulars of incident in her life. Besides Toklas, there were two others who entered fully into this, and they were Picasso and Carl Van Vechten. By 1923, Stein had begun to write more about geography and place; for years she had been writing plays that reminded her of the Civil War plays she had loved as a child, and, she said, “a landscape is such a natural arrangement for a battlefield or a play that one must write plays.” It was in 1923 that she wrote three more portraits of the people to whom she was closest. For Toklas she wrote “A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow A Love Story,” and for Picasso she wrote “If I Told Him A Completed Portrait of Picasso,” and for Van Vechten she wrote “Van or Twenty Years After,” though they had at that point known each other for ten years. Mythologizing was irresistible to her.
From plays she came to opera, and with Virgil Thomson, she wrote Four Saints in Three Acts, which had its first production in New York. Thomson decided that the opera should initially be performed with an all-Black cast. At first Van Vechten wondered if that made sense, as the characters were white, but Thomson pointed out that if white singers could “black up” for Aïda, then Black singers could “white up for Four Saints.” Van Vechten knew Gertrude Stein would find the idea interesting—he thought of Stein as being particularly sympathetic to the difficulties faced by Black Americans, and had been impressed by Stein’s choice in her story “Melanctha: Each One as She May” to make the two central characters Black. It may have been because Stein used these characters to rehearse a failed love affair of her own that the dialect in “Melanctha” didn’t ring true to everyone, but Richard Wright did later say that Stein’s language had helped him to find his own. In any case, Thomson was right about the casting choice—the first performance of Four Saints, in 1934, was a sensation. Stein had not come to America; Van Vechten wrote her immediately to say,
Dear Gertrude, Four Saints, in our vivid theatrical parlance, is a knockout and a wow. . . . I haven’t seen a crowd more excited since Sacre du Printemps. The difference was that they were pleasurably excited. The Negroes are divine, like El Grecos, more Spanish, more Saints, more opera singers in their dignity and simplicity and extraordinary plastic line than any white singers could ever be.
There could be something patronizing in Van Vechten’s obsession with Black culture; some of his Black contemporaries found his enthusiasm in the last degree presumptuous, others thought him the most open-minded white man they’d met. Van Vechten was an active supporter of and participator in the Harlem Renaissance and one of the great collectors of its work. He arranged for Langston Hughes’s first book to be published; he was friends with Paul Robeson and Ethel Waters and Zora Neale Hurston. He once wrote to a friend, “If I were a chameleon my colour would now be at least seal-brown. I see no one but Negroes.”
He was a chameleon. He had grown up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he collected birds’ eggs and was an improbable dandy and never missed a performance of a traveling opera company. He made his way to the University of Chicago, began working for Chicago newspapers after he graduated, and proceeded to New York. He was happily married to Fania Marinoff, a Russian Jewish actress with whom he had an unusually close and open relationship. During their fifty years of marriage, he also had at least three long relationships with men. He was a novelist, a music and dance critic, an archivist of the first order, a belletrist, a lover of animals and author of a book on cats, and a person of unbounded enthusiasm for other people’s projects. By 1932, he was seriously taking pictures and for the rest of his life he was also a photographer. He arranged, one way and another, to photograph nearly every important writer and artist of his time. Much to Van Vechten’s joy, Alfred Stieglitz liked these photographs very much. Stieglitz wrote to him: “If I wore a hat I would take it off before your photographs. . . . They are damn swell.”
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Some months after the opera premiered, toward the end of 1934, Stein and Toklas came back to America for the first time in more than thirty years. Stein had felt unable to return until she had written a book that was a popular success, and a triumphal lecture tour following the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was the right occasion. The book was more accessible than Stein’s other works, in part because it was written in a style that imitated Toklas’s own. Delighted by what he thought was long overdue acclaim, Van Vechten encouraged Stein to come and went along for part of the tour to bask in the reflected glory.
Stein gave, among others, the lectures “What is English Literature,” “Portraits and Repetition,” and “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans.” Gertrude Stein explained that she had noticed that every American starts over on the project of writing American history or the American novel. She did that. And, at the same time, she had also noticed that each American chooses a tradition, collects, in some sense, his or her own sensibility, and she did that, too. She said the way she wrote was not repetition but insistence, and that insistence is different every time; she said that this insistence “is what William James calls the Will to Live.” She said that what she did was avoid names, and this she had found in Walt Whitman, who “wanted really wanted to express the thing and not call it by its name.” And she came back and back to Henry James: “His whole paragraph was detached what it said from what it did, what it was from what it held, and over it all something floated not floated away but just floated, floated up there.” Stein’s project was, she thought, “what American literature had always done . . . the disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something.”
