Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

Karren Alenier

As a reader of most, if not all, Gertrude Stein biographies, the Steiny Road Poet wants to stand up and applaud Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife.

In clear, accessible language and well organized informational flow, Wade addresses the myths and legends of Gertrude Stein through the lens of Stein’s quest to gain recognition and readership. One important pathway for Wade’s scholarship was opened when she gained access in the fall of 2019 to the unprocessed Yale University archive of Leon Katz.   Wade’s interest in Katz and what he knew about Stein was spurred by Janet Malcolm’s  2007 controversial book Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. Suffice it to say, that Malcolm was frustrated by Katz’s reluctance to share information but politely characterized  him  as “reticent.”

Katz was a doctoral student at Columbia University who, in 1948, took interest in the early notebooks of Gertrude Stein in her archive at Yale. In November 1952, Katz began four months of intensive interviews with Toklas. Much of what he learned remained secret. He died in 2017 and his papers, including the notes from those interviews with Toklas, were sold to Yale. Alice and the academic community expected that he would write a book, but he never did. Wade speculates that one possible reason why Katz never published that long-awaited book was that the complex relationship between Stein and Toklas made it too personal for Toklas with too many limitations imposed by Toklas on Katz. So instead, he turned to theater and wrote a play about the three of them in conversation (p. 370).

To a large degree, it is because of her partner Alice Toklas that Gertrude Stein, who was more ridiculed than praised during her lifetime, continues to be discussed, if not read today, mostly in academic circles. Stein, a Jewish American author who spent most of her life in France, transitioned from the literary period known as Modernism to Postmodernism in a way different from other writers of that time. But, here Steiny digresses, because while Wade discusses Stein’s work that made her a contemporary in competition with such writers as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot, her works were nothing like those of the other Modernists. Her experiments in language exceeded by far those of other Modernists. For example, she radically took apart grammar, sometimes making it her goal to do away with nouns in favor of verbs and adverbs. Sometimes a word was reduced to a single letter. These and other experiments pushed her into the 21st century exacting influence on current-day writers. Wade plays the role of a guide, imparting to the reader enough knowledge to begin reading Gertrude Stein’s massive oeuvre.

Most of the material that Wade presents is not entirely new but is much more fleshed out than in other sources. Additionally, Wade shines light on the myths perpetuated by Stein, Toklas, and their good friend Carl Van Vechten who was an arts critic, photographer, and novelist.

Stein named Van Vechten her literary executor just before she died in 1946. Top of Wade’s list is the story about how Van Vechten met Stein at the May 1913 premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring when the audience went riotously mad because the dissonant music, the primitive style of dancing, and the act of human sacrifice displeased them. The truth is that Van Vechten and Stein met at the second performance of Stravinsky’s groundbreaking work but, as Wade aptly stated, Stein and Van Vechten “knew the value in self-mythologizing (p. 76).” The trick was to strike a balance between publicity focused on the artist’s life versus publication and critique of artistic work.

Wade follows the Rite of Spring myth with the fact that Van Vechten was responsible for bringing about an offer of publication for Stein’s book-length poem Tender Buttons. The offer, which Stein gladly accepted, came from his poet friend Donald Evans who was founder of Claire Marie Press. Evans said his press was interested in promoting “New Books for Exotic Tastes.” Mabel Dodge, a friend of both Gertrude and  her brother Leo Stein, urged her not to accept Evans’ publication offer. Dodge called Claire Marie Press “third rate” and warned Stein that publication there risked making the public think “there is something degenerate & effete & decadent about the whole of the cubist movement which they all connect you with (pp. 76-77).” Wade observes that Dodge was desperate to maintain influence over Stein, who eventually, with strong support from Toklas, would cut off their friendship.

Here Steiny pauses to add the following details. Evans was responsible for determining  the order of the three sections of Tender Buttons. In Steiny’s opinion, the way he did this demonstrates his familiarity with the work and his concern for its success. He deemed “Objects,” the easiest of the three sections for a reader to approach and that “Rooms,” which is one long flow of 85 stanzas, was the most difficult. “Objects” and “Food,” divided into mostly short subpoems, are similar, but “Food” begins with a longer subpoem.  Leo Stein hated Picasso’s cubist work and was disgusted that his sister was influenced by Picasso’s new style of painting. He called Tender Buttons nonsense.

Yes, Tender Buttons was ridiculed, but Wade points out “the attention the book garnered was unprecedented” (p. 77) and not all the reviews, columns, and opinion pieces were negative.

The uniqueness of this biography is that it doesn’t stop when Stein dies hence the title “Aferlife.” The last half of the book proceeds with the story of how Stein’s work continued to be promoted after her death. An example of an insight from the second half of the book is that in Stein’s portrait of Ada (Ada is a stand-in for Alice), Stein projects on the character Ada an unhappy childhood. Toklas told researcher Leon Katz that she (Alice) had a happy childhood with a mother she loved very much and a life of friends and  music (she studied to be a concert pianist). Her mother died in 1897 when she was 20 years old.

Katz said he found a passage in one of Stein’s early notebooks where she writes that conditions at home were disagreeably bad after her mother died and that she should make the father character in her novel The Making of Americans “angry the way pa was with me.” Her mother died of an unnamed female cancer when Stein was 14. Katz found a notebook passage that read, “a father character approaching his daughter one night [telling her] ‘to come and keep him warm (p. 271).’” Katz added that this was connected in her notebook with her “experiences with Uncle Sol (p. 271).” She never said she was molested, but these entries seemed to suggest the possibility.

Wade addresses Stein’s politics gingerly. She characterizes them as “highly inconsistent, difficult to assess coherently…tinged with so much irony or pure contrariness that it’s dangerous to take them at face value (p. 189).”  Stein favored Republicans, was anti -Franklin Delano Roosevelt but had tea with Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House in 1934, asked her American editor to publish her nearly literal (and rather babyfied)  translations of the speeches of Pétain when he was head of the Vichy government, wrote a letter of exoneration in support of Bernard Faÿ who was responsible as head of the Bibliothèque  Nationale under the Vichy Government for sending over a thousand  Jews and Masons  to the extermination camps or a firing squad.  In the Afterlife section, Toklas, sure that she would be carrying out Stein’s wishes, sold two Picasso drawings to finance covertly and successfully springing Faÿ from a prison hospital after he was sentenced to a life of hard labor. Faÿ was the French intellectual who helped her make her 1934-35 lecture successful and who prevented the Nazis from stealing her art during WWII.

Stein herself told a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in 1937 when he came to investigate left-wing activities that while she considered herself a radical, that she was “most generally always wrong [about politics] (p. 190).”

Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife was published May 22, 2025, by Faber & Faber in Great Britain and by Schribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, October 7, 2025. The Scribner book designers has had some fun in the opening pages by imprinting the Stein-Toklas insignia circle that reads Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose and two pages of phrases that Stein was labeled with (and probably didn’t like) such as: The Mama of Dada is going gaga, Typhoid Mary of Prose Style, L’ogresse de la rue de Fleurus.