Gertrude Stein: Life, Writing Style, and Paris Legacy

Introduction

It is difficult to think of 1920s Paris without recalling Gertrude Stein. A friend to some of the most prominent artists and writers of the 20th century, Stein is not only known for her own accomplished literary contributions, but also for her distinctive personal lifestyle.

Early Life and Move to Paris

Gertrude Stein was born in 1874 near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She attended Radcliffe from 1893 to 1897, where she studied under the philosopher and psychologist William James. One day Stein wrote, "Dear Professor James, I am sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today." The next day James sent her a postcard saying, "I understand perfectly how you feel, I often feel like that myself," and then gave her the highest mark in his course. She then began premedical work at Johns Hopkins. In 1902, she decided to take a break from her studies and went abroad, finally joining her brother Leo in Paris at 27 Rue de Fleurus in 1903.

Stein would not touch American soil again for thirty years. She once said, "I have lived half my life in Paris, not the half that made me but the half in which I made what I made."

The Literary Salon and the Lost Generation

Stein became very interested and involved in the modern art movements beginning to flourish in Paris. She not only encouraged, but also purchased the works of many budding artists, including Picasso and Matisse. During the 1920s, she became the leader of a cultural salon that included writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Stein had a great influence on her group of post-World War I expatriates and is credited with coining the phrase the lost generation in reference to those living out the postwar years in Paris.

"Paris was the place that suited those of us that were to create the twentieth century art and literature." In Paris France, Stein writes that everyone who writes lives inside themselves in order to tell what is there: "That is why writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really" (Stein 2).

Writing Style and Major Works

"When I began writing," said Stein, "I was always writing about beginning again and again. In The Making of Americans I was making a continuous present, a continuous beginning again and again, the way they do in making automobiles or anything — each one has to be begun, but now everything having been begun, nothing had to be begun again." Stein's abstract style was not very well received by the general public. Many in the art world, however, referred to her as a literary cubist, comparing her to the cubist painters of that time, due to her ability to project reality beyond reality.

Stein was undoubtedly influenced by the salon of artists she entertained, but her former professor William James also had a great influence on her writing style. James invented the term "stream of consciousness" and explored its meanings in The Principles of Psychology (1890). As his student during the 1890s, Stein applied the concepts of James's psychology to her own writing. In Three Lives (1909) and Tender Buttons (1914), she "showed how the conventions of sequential narrative and discursive description could be demolished and remade" (American 135). Stein would slowly but surely win an audience for her stream-of-consciousness writing: "I am writing for myself and strangers... This is the only way that I can do it."

Stein's writing emphasizes sounds and rhythms rather than the conventional sense of words. By departing from traditional grammar and syntax, she attempted to capture "moments of consciousness, independent of time and memory." Her first published work, Three Lives, explores the mental processes of three women. The Making of Americans (1925) is considered her most characteristic and most difficult narrative. Stein's most famous work is her 1933 autobiography, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which she presents as the memoir of her lifetime companion rather than her own. Her critical essays include "Composition as Explanation" (1926), "How to Write" (1931), "Narration" (1935), and "Lectures in America" (1935). Other works include Tender Buttons, a volume of poetry; two librettos for the operas of Virgil Thomson — Four Saints in Three Acts (1934) and The Mother of Us All (1947); Wars I Have Seen (1945), a collection of personal observations; and Brewsie and Willie (1946), about American soldiers in France.