A Chance Meeting, page 15
Van Vechten found it extremely exciting to be on tour with Stein. He wrote to Stein’s publisher Bennett Cerf, “It gets wilder & wilder—Greta Garbo in her palmiest days never had such a tour!” To Fania Marinoff he said that Stein just “began to read & they loved it and were mad about it & were entranced & she read on & on & they loved it and afterwards they all but kissed her.” In later years, he would quote a student who said, “I was dead against her and I just went to see what she looked like and then she took the door of my mind right off its hinges and now it’s wide open.” Van Vechten, always so buoyant, felt exalted with Gertrude Stein.
It turned out that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas liked to go up in airplanes, though the first time they were supposed to fly they were scared to go alone, and they made Van Vechten come with them to Chicago. As soon as they were up in the air, they realized that they loved flying, and then they flew the whole time they were in America. Stein had always loved the artificial regularity of the map of the United States; she liked seeing the rectangular brown and green farms spread out beneath them.
They liked to drive as well as to fly—Gertrude Stein had been one of the first Americans to have an automobile in France. She had ordered it from America and learned to drive it in her own imperious style, with a fine disregard for reverse until much later. Stein and Toklas had been part of the women’s brigade that brought aid to soldiers at the front during the Great War. Stein drove soldiers and supplies through muddy fields; Toklas navigated. Once, they picked up a man whose convoy had broken down. As it was night, and they couldn’t see who it was, they just told him to climb in the back, and they bucketed home. The general was graciousness itself when they got to headquarters and he climbed out of the car.
Toklas sometimes said that Stein reminded her of a general, a Civil War general; Toklas said it didn’t matter for which side. When Stein wrote Four in America, she seems to have felt close to her portrait of General Grant, whose memoirs she loved. Generals were always American to her, and she was a general of the avant-garde.
While they were in the United States, Van Vechten took many photographs of Stein and Toklas, separately and together, including one of Stein standing before a draped American flag. As there is a natural intimacy between generals and photographers—they are both often interested in the depiction of heroes and landscapes—it made sense that during this trip Van Vechten and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas became the Woojums family. Van Vechten was Papa Woojums, Stein was Baby Woojums, and Toklas was Mama Woojums. The family name contained its own private joke—“Woojums” was also the name of a “lethal” cocktail Van Vechten had invented (five parts gin, one part Bacardi, dash of bitters, dash of absinthe, teaspoon of lemon juice, and a little grenadine). The Woojums recipe did not turn up in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook that Toklas put together some years later, but Fania Marinoff’s lamb curry and her pecan nut cakes and Van Vechten’s recipes for garlic ice cream and for Viennese cheese pancakes were all to be found there.
Stein and Toklas went to the West Coast as part of their tour, but Van Vechten did not accompany them. There, they met Dashiell Hammett and Charlie Chaplin, who both appeared in Stein’s A Play Called Not and Now: “They first meet as each one is just about to go away.” Stein would certainly have been glad to know that Chaplin admired her most famous phrase, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
Gertrude Stein by Carl Van Vechten, 1934.
It later turned up as one of Chaplin’s lines in his movie Limelight, after which his character said, “’snot bad, someone should quote that.” Being introduced to everyone in America was thrilling, but Stein also found it lonely to see American culture thriving and moving on and to feel outside of it, first meeting everyone just as she was about to go away. Carl Van Vechten—“the touching so helping held”—seemed even dearer in the midst of so many new and transient affections. He wrote to Mama and Baby Woojums: “Thornton Wilder has got me down with jealousy. Don’t go and like him BETTER, PLEASE! . . . Don’t you go calling TW a woojums! I will bite him! . . . I spend all my time in the darkroom crying for my beautiful pair of Woojums who are TRAVELLING in the WEST. LOVE, LOVE, to you BOTH! . . . Carlo.” A general, even a general of the avant-garde, must have a few close friends who can see that she is also a baby. Gertrude Stein, always the youngest child, wrote for her family, the one she made for herself.
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When Carl Van Vechten wrote the introduction to Stein’s Selected Works, published in 1946, he said, “The books of this artist are indeed full of these sly references to matters unknown to their readers and only someone completely familiar with the routine, and roundabout, ways of Miss Stein’s daily life would be able to explain every line of her prose.” This, he thought, could be said of the work of any great artist; it is probably what he meant by intimacy. He finished his preface as if he were starting another letter, replacing the rose with his own dearest noun: “Dear Gertrude, may I do a little caressing myself and say truthfully A Collection is a Collection is a Collection?”
A few weeks after she had seen his introduction, Gertrude Stein wrote her own short preface. She began, “I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it, and Carl was one of the earliest ones that made me be certain that I was going to be.” She went on: “Little by little it was built up and all the time Carl wrote to me and I wrote to him and he always knew, and it was always a comfort and now he has put down all his knowledge of what I did and it is a great comfort.”
Van Vechten, upon receiving Stein’s preface, was so pleased that he didn’t notice when he made one further change, misremembering by a year the date of their first meeting: “Dearest Baby Woojums, Well the ‘testimonial’ arrived and it is beautiful and everybody is crazy about it and Papa Woojums is very much touched and feels very nostalgic and wishes he had a white pleated shirt to put on so that he could look and feel the way he did in 1914.” Perhaps it was a relief to him that they had had this exchange when, a month later, on July 28, he received a telegram: “Dearest Papa Woojums, Baby Woojums passed suddenly today your loving Mama Woojums.”
16. MARCEL DUCHAMP AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
ONE SPRING day in 1917, Joseph Stella, Walter Arensberg, and Marcel Duchamp were sitting at lunch. It was just April, and it was warm. They had a few glasses of wine, and they got a little boisterous. Joseph Stella, an Italian painter who had lived much of his life in America and Paris, was interested in cubism and in Dada, which was becoming the rage. Walter Arensberg had been converted to modern art in general and to Duchamp in particular by the famous New York Armory show of 1913, which had included Nude Descending a Staircase—described in the press as “an explosion in a shingle factory”—and had made Duchamp, for a while, the most notorious European artist in America. Marcel Duchamp hadn’t been around for the Armory show, though he was, in his own detached way, interested in his sudden fame, and the experience may have suggested America to him as an eventual place of residence. In 1915, disqualified from French military service because of a heart irregularity, he had moved to New York City.
Arensberg and Stella, as was true of many people, were completely seduced by Duchamp and had become avid co-conspirators in the projects he would periodically undertake. The three of them would go gallivanting around New York; they found everything amusing, which was perhaps not surprising, given that the alternative was to think about the battle of Verdun. They were all members of the Society of Independent Artists, and they were now engrossed in the plans for a major exhibition, meant to follow on the Armory show and introduce American audiences to the full range of modern art. This was set to open at the Grand Central Palace the following week.
For a fee of six dollars, anyone who wanted to exhibit work in the show could, and this had proved to be affordable for quite a range of artists. Marcel Duchamp was the head of the hanging committee, a title he must have enjoyed, and it had been his idea to hang all 2,125 works of art in the alphabetical order of their creators’ names, starting with “R”—the letter had been chosen out of a hat. The ensuing democratic chaos had traditional landscape painters next to cubist still lifes and photographs next to artificial-flower arrangements. Duchamp and Stella and Arensberg had worked hard, but perhaps they found the sanctimonious tone taken by the rest of the committee trying. Sitting at lunch, they had an idea.
The next day, they went down to 118 Fifth Avenue, to the showroom and warehouse of J. L. Mott Iron Works, which sold plumbing fixtures, and they purchased a urinal: a “flatback, ‘Bedfordshire’-model porcelain” urinal. Duchamp took it back to his studio, inverted it, and wrote, in square black capitals, the name “R. Mutt,” a combination of the name of the plumbing company and the cartoon strip “Mutt and Jeff.” Then the three men had the urinal delivered to the Grand Central Palace, along with an envelope containing the six-dollar entry fee for Richard Mutt.
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When they arrived at the hall some hours later, all hell had broken loose. The show’s organizers—many of them society ladies, such as Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt and Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney, who were footing a large part of the bill—were shocked. The board of directors had summarily refused to include Mr. Mutt’s entry. There was a big argument in which artistic freedom and responsibility were adduced to support opposing positions, and, in a climactic moment, standing in the middle of the enormous hall, surrounded by the other 2,125 works of art, Walter Arensberg laid his hand gently upon the urinal and said to a member of the board, “A lovely form has been revealed, freed from its functional purposes, therefore a man has clearly made an aesthetic contribution.”
The board conferred and said no. Arensberg and Duchamp promptly resigned and left the hall. No one in the Society of Independent Artists seems to have noticed how or by whom the urinal was removed, but a week later it was at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery, placed in front of a Marsden Hartley painting, whose central form the urinal did in fact distinctly echo. The Hartley also couldn’t be exhibited anywhere but at 291, as it showed German soldiers in helmets, pennants flying. One week after the U.S. Senate had declared war on Germany, the painting could easily have been viewed as treasonous. Stieglitz was worried about Steichen and his other friends in France, but it was difficult for him to think of Germany as an aggressor. Besides, he hated censorship. He was displaying the Hartley.
That past week, Stieglitz had also hung a Georgia O’Keeffe show, partly to show his independence from the Independents. Stieglitz was an iconoclast first, but he had a sense of humor; Arensberg and Duchamp had taken the urinal to 291, hoping that he would take some photographs. He did. “The photographs,” Carl Van Vechten reported gleefully to Gertrude Stein, “make it look like anything from a Madonna to a Buddha.” The artists Stieglitz cared about most weren’t well represented by the show at the Grand Central Palace; he was glad to be part of a small protest; and he thought the whole thing was funny.
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Duchamp and Stieglitz came to know each other pretty well over the years. Georgia O’Keeffe, often the best observer of the people who came through 291, described how she had first met Duchamp at a party. She had been drinking tea, and she remembered very distinctly that when she had finished, Duchamp “rose from his chair, took my teacup and put it down at the side with a grace that I had never seen in anyone before and have seldom seen since.”
Duchamp may have found Stieglitz a little dogmatic; Stieglitz was sure at first that Duchamp was a charlatan, though he later reversed himself and was regretful that he had not had a Duchamp show at his galleries. They never became great friends, but they respected and kept track of each other, and there were letters back and forth. I think I can get that Brancusi you wanted for the next show, I was sorry to hear about O’Keeffe’s operation; thanks for your concern, yes, we’re all right here. Stieglitz’s epistolary style was magniloquent; Duchamp’s, predictably, terse. When Stieglitz, intending to publish the results in Camera Work, had written to artists he knew and asked one of his favorite questions, “Can a Photograph Have the Significance of a Work of Art?,” Duchamp wrote back, “You know exactly what I think about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.”
The urinal was the most publicly scandalous in a series of works Duchamp was then creating—the readymades—which he made by selecting, signing, and renaming objects. A snow shovel became In Advance of the Broken Arm; a glass ampoule, 50 cc of Paris Air; and the urinal itself, Fountain. Stieglitz’s photos of Fountain were published in the second issue of a magazine Duchamp edited called The Blind Man. In the same issue, there was an article, probably by Duchamp, on the subject of Richard Mutt’s artistic creation, in which the author said, “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it,” and in so doing “created a new thought for that object.”
Stieglitz would have appreciated that, and might have felt that Duchamp’s particular way of choosing was a little like the way a photographer chose a subject and didn’t know the result until the film was developed. But the two men weren’t aligned in all their projects. Duchamp was rapidly coming to feel uninterested in all the art that he called “retinal,” the art that pushed and prodded at the eye with color on canvas or a piece of paper, just the work that Stieglitz championed and made himself. From 1915 until 1923, when he ostensibly “abandoned” art forever, Duchamp was at work on The Large Glass, also known as The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. On two big sheets of glass, Duchamp laid down the lead designs of his erotic machine. Although the work was intended to be endlessly interpretable, it was more or less possible to say that in the upper glass the bride was rendered in what Duchamp called, at different times, “the Halo of the Bride,” “the Milky Way,” and the “Cinematic Blossoming.” This was connected by a “Tender of Gravity” to the “Bachelor Apparatus” below, where lived the bachelors and the “Nine Malic Moulds” in their “Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries,” near the “Chocolate Grinder,” and at the mercy of the “Large Scissors,” while the “Occulist Witnesses” looked on. The Large Glass stood in what Duchamp called a “delay”; it was a permanently unfinished invention, and a joke. Stieglitz, often so serious, was surprisingly willing to be amused. He thought Duchamp’s glass was one of the great works of art of all time and said so in a talk he gave on it at the Brooklyn Museum.
Duchamp made his intentions in The Large Glass both more and less clear by writing a set of explanations contained in an associated, unexhibited work, The Green Box. When he finished The Green Box, in 1934, Duchamp sent it to Stieglitz with a note explaining it as his “last secretion (latest).” It is, he went on to say, “all about the glass you saw in Brooklyn a few years ago (which by the way is broken, [hope to mend it]). How are you? And how is O’Keeffe? sorry to see you so rarely. . . . The ‘essential’ of one’s life amounts probably to a few hours.” Stieglitz would have been sorry to hear that the glass had shattered in storage, but perhaps he thought to himself that it was more interesting to leave the chance cracks in the piece.
After the incident with the urinal, Duchamp wrote to his sister, Suzanne Duchamp, who was also an artist, relating the story of the Fountain. Adding layers of ruse, he said that R. Mutt was the masculine pseudonym of one of his female friends, though he could have meant that it was the masculine pseudonym of his own female pseudonym; he sometimes went by the name Rrose Sélavy. After the piece was turned down by the board, he decided, he said, not to exhibit it in a salon des refusés, as he didn’t want it to be—and in the letter only this last word was in English—lonely.
When Arensberg and Duchamp showed up with the urinal that day, Stieglitz had them set it by a window. They stood around while he set up his camera and arranged fabric across the window to soften the light. As the original artwork was eventually lost or thrown out, it turned out that the Stieglitz portraits were all that remained of the Fountain. Perhaps Duchamp was amused when he looked at the photographs, which showed a very fragile light falling from the left, emphasizing the beauty of the urinal’s shape. In the background, he would have just been able to make out in the Hartley painting a helmet, and a flag.
17. WILLA CATHER AND EDWARD STEICHEN AND KATHERINE ANNE PORTER
WILLA Cather walked steadily up Fifth Avenue. She had worked well that morning, for her customary three hours, and she had finished a small, difficult section of her new story. The day was warm but not too warm, and she found she was looking forward to having her photograph taken. Sometimes she dressed formally for photographs, in floor-length gowns and elaborate jewelry, and at other times she had dressed as a man, in a suit. But on this day she was carrying with her a white middy blouse, of the kind she always wore when she was working, with a little dark tie. The photographs were to be used for publicity, and she wanted to look as if she were equally at ease in the west, where her new book was set, and in the city in which she lived.
The past two years had been busy ones—she had published My Mortal Enemy and completed Death Comes for the Archbishop. She and Edith Lewis had made a trip back to the southwest, which had helped her to get hold of the idea for this most recent book, and she had finished editing the two volumes of Sarah Orne Jewett’s collected stories. Rereading Jewett’s sketches had made her wonder again if it was possible to write a book in which the landscape was the central character. She was pleased with the direction Death Comes for the Archbishop had taken; she felt the dryness and power of the southwest complemented her nineteenth-century French father. Edith was right that her characters were getting older and more forceful; they were grappling with faith in a way she had never been able to manage before—she felt she was getting a better understanding of Flaubert.
