BOOKS

A bore is a bore is a bore is a bore

Philip Hensher

SISTER BROTHER: GERTRUDE AND LEO STEIN by Brenda Wineapple

Bloomsbury, £20, pp. 507

Gertrude Stein is, on the whole, an absolutely terrible writer, and, judging by her writings alone, she deserves no better than to be the subject of this very dull and silly biography. No one, apart from her devoted amanuensis, cook, housekeeper, bully and lover Alice B. Toldas, has ever read her oeuvre from beginning to end, and no one ever will; though the later books she wrote under the influence of Alice have enormous charm, much of her work is just rambling nonsense, private references and doolally burblings, set down, never to be looked at again.

She was different from any other one in being one having sound come out of her. She was one having sound come out of her. She was one having had sound come out of her. She had been then different from any other one. She might, this thing is not certain, she might go on being different from any other one. She might not be different then from any other one. Certainly she was different from one other one. She was different from the other one, the other one of the two of them.

This is quoted at random, but it's all exactly the same. As someone once remarked, this isn't writing; it's hardly even typing.

Even a relative supporter like Edmund Wilson couldn't be doing with Gertrude's witterings, talking about the 'fatty degener- ation of her imagination and style,' and admitting he could not read The Making of Americans from beginning to end.

I do not know whether it is possible to do so .. . the reader is all too soon in a state, not to follow the slow becoming of life, but sim- ply to fall asleep.

The idea of Gertrude Stein as a genius, writing masterpieces, is a very old one; it dates back to a time before Stein had pub- lished anything at all, and comes very largely from Stein's opinion of herself. In the period that Brenda Wineapple's biogra- phy is concerned with, Stein wrote almost nothing of any value or interest — perhaps only Three Lives, a cubist Flaubert in which the burbling is kept under control. It's only with the advent of Alice Toklas, and the arrival, perhaps for the first time, of someone who was prepared to read her stuff, that the long journey began towards intelligibility, towards shaping and plan- ning.

Gertrude's brother Leo is, perhaps, an interesting figure in the life of the time, and in Gertrude's career. How the pair of them went from wealthy, philistine Amen- can provincial society into the bosom of the European intellectual avant-garde on the basis of not much more than a startling taste in dress and a reputation for advanced sympathies in art is, and remains something of a mystery. Nobody could bear the two of them for long; 'Miss Stein came, fat beyond the limits of imagination,' Mary Berenson wrote. Her brother, Logan Pearsall Smith, was no kinder: 'a black con- tingent of Steins would occasionally darken our drive, led by the great Gertrude her- self.' They were undoubtedly preposterous figures; few had a kind word to say for Gertrude's brown corduroy kimonos. But they had money, and, prepared to spend it on new art, very quickly built up one of the most extraordinary collections ever amassed.

Whether Gertrude and Leo really knew what they were buying is a moot point. Most of the collection was bought from one dealer, whose advice was assiduaisly followed. Their sympathies were strictly bound; they bought the post-impressionists and early Picasso, but, on being offered Picasso's single greatest picture, 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', Leo could not see the point of it, and turned it down. Having said that, the collection before the first world war was extraordinary. Brenda Wineapple misses the obvious opportunity to provide a list of what is known, but the glimpses in photographs are quite stagger- ing: great piles of Matisse, Renoir, Manet, Picasso and Cezanne. The collection was so outstanding that, with a bit of buying and selling, it could be lived off for the rest of their lives; Gertrude and Alice went through the second world war on the money 'Madame Cezanne with a Fan' brought in. Leo, who lost money in the stock market crash, slowly sold most of what was left — his Delacroix, his Toulouse-Lautrec, his Renoir — to pay for food.

In a way, the collection is still more impressive for being built up by people with hardly any feeling for painting. It was sheer luck, one suspects, that the Steins happened on Camille and Picasso; if they had met different painters, they might quite happily have bought them. They both carried on buying pictures throughout their lives, but never again hit on painters of any interest. Leo developed a taste for Ottakar Coubine. Gertrude, after buying Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso, turned to Picabia, Tchelitchew and Christian Berman, before finally settling on an obscure English baronet, Sir Francis Rose. She bought over 100 of his pictures; when Picasso was told what she had paid for them, he remarked that she could have got something quite good for the same sum.

Leo and Gertrude quarrelled in the end — she quarrelled with everyone in the end, apart from Alice. After 1914, they never spoke to each other again. But it's not an interesting story, and it hasn't made an interesting book. The really fascinating relationship in Gertrude's life was with Alice, but that's already been done, with exemplary charm and wit, by Diana Souhami in Gertrude and Alice. Brenda Wineapple's joint biography is the product of a great deal of research; one is persuad- ed, unlike in many writers on Gertrude Stein, that she has actually read the books. Unfortunately, the result is an unexciting book, even by the unprecedented standards of tedium set by American academic biog- raphy. Brenda Wineapple has put into it more or less what she has found out, even if it is impossible to see who on earth would be interested. There's a great deal on Gertrude's academic career, which must have been pretty easy to research, and therefore all goes in.

In her senior year Stein not only signed up for another course with Parker, on the nervous system and its terminal organs, but undertook the study of vertebrate embryology with Edward I. Mark, Harvard's well-respected Hersey Professor of Anatomy, and a course in ayptogamic botany, which was highly recommended for much of the zoology curriculum.

And on it rolls, placid and soporific as Gertrude's own writings.

When Wineapple abandons the bludgeoning detail of her, no doubt, admirable research, what she largely comes up with is the usual biographer's bilge:

As with many families, food among the Steins was a mode of discourse, gathering its own symbolic properties: a means for giving and withholding attention, a metaphor both for the body and for sexuality, a symbol of togetherness, an emollient, and the evocative substance which at all costs must be ingested or avoided.

That last phrase, which as I can see means 'it was vitally important that food be eaten — or not eaten — one of the two, anyway' is a particularly exciting find for connoisseurs of nonsense, but the book is full of these ludicrous pseudo-insights. I particularly relished her comment on cubism:

It became, among many other things, the prism through which Gertrude and Leo Stein would refract their profound disappointment with each other.

One of the great curses of contemporary American biography is the measuring of figures from the past against the pieties of the present — what one might think of as the 'was Napoleon homophobic?' school of biography. Here, Wineapple is utterly unfaultable. No doubt, in her youth and in Paris, Gertrude came across considerable racism and anti-Semitism, no doubt she was taken much less seriously because she was fat, and because she was a woman. All these things are quite deplorable. But I really fail to see that any contemporary of Stein's would have given these matters anything approaching the prominence they are given here. No one is asking for sympathy with genuine anti- Semites, like Mary Berenson. But it's simply false to take idle and innocent comments on race of the period and treat them as if they were deliberate and shock- ing transgressions of taboos we have now put in place.

A small example of this sort of thing comes with a paragraph on the suicide of the psychologist Otto Weininger. His sui- cide was hailed by many, especially anti-Semites and homophobes, as the necessary and logical conclusion to his book Per and Character]. It was said that Weininger, a Jew and a homo- sexual, merely had killed the Jew and the 'woman' inside him.

Struck by this impressive anticipation of the concerns and language of 1970s psycho- analysis in 1903, the reader will turn to the footnotes. There are 63 pages of footnotes, but, alas, there seems to have been insuffi- cient space to identify the source of these thrillingly useful comments.

One more gloriously absurd piece of piety deserves comment. It has recently become improper to refer to 'black' people in print, at least in this sort of biography; idly wondering what Wineapple would have to say about Gertrude Stein's attitude to race, I was sternly referred by the index to look the issue up under 'African- Americans'. That, in turn, referred me to a splendid footnote.

There is no direct evidence, however, that Gertrude or Leo Stein read such publications as the special issue of L 'Assiette au Beurre in 1904 devoted to King Leopold's abuses in the Congo, but doubtless both were aware of the widely reported scandals.

I wonder whether black people in the Congo would have regarded themselves as 'African-Americans'.

Someone — was it Kingsley Amis? — once remarked that academics have now taken on the role of monks in the Middle Ages; just as they were paid to carry out devotions on behalf of the rich and lazy, so we pay Brenda Wineapple to read and filter the works of writers, like Gertrude Stein, we have no intention of reading our- selves. She deserves a prize for having got through all Stein's gibberish, and another one for managing to describe an average bit of The Making of Americans as a 'comic rendition . . . a rhythmic tour de force'. But, unlike the estimable Diana Souhami, who in Gertrude and Alice made one see two difficult people as charming, amusing and eccentric, Wineapple hasn't made us see her subject as anything but one for a hard, dutiful slog through deeply unpromis- ing material.