on relationships that help you become

Gertrude & Alice book review

Someone once asked Gertrude Stein if she was a lesbian. Stein answered no, I just like Alice.
- Looking for Alice, Henrik Karlsson

After reading Looking for Alice I became obsessed. I sent it to all the group chats, discussed non-stop with friends, & re-read the article so many times I could pull out quotes verbatim. It became my topic of conversation for weeks - what does it mean to find a person who turns your brain inside out? How do I find one? What is life like with such a person for decades afterward?

Walking through Prospect Park I stumbled on an old bookshelf containing a biography of the two myths of love, Gertrude & Alice. I bought the book and blitzed through it in one day.

*

I love the book; not because of the content itself, which I find to be limited in details of the relationship, and too verbose with veneering characters. But in the short time the author did spend on Gertrude & Alice, their relationship was so singularly distinct that it pulled me out of orbit. When Alice first met Gertrude she heard bells ringing, “a sure sign that she was in the presence of genius”. She only felt it with Gertrude, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and Picasso. That was a core of their relationship, the deepest of their agreement - that Gertrude was a genius. When Gertrude died, Alice would live in extreme frugality for the next decades, only spending money to publish Gertrude posthumously.

Gertrude’s adoration of Alice permeated through her writing, “I marvel at my baby. I marvel at her beauty I marvel at her perfection I marvel at her purity I marvel at her tenderness. I marveled at her charm I marveled at her vanity… I marvel at her generosity, I marvel at her cow¹.” They wrote notes to each other inscribed ‘DD’ and ‘YD’ (Darling Darling and Your Darling), called each other all the names - “Alice was gay, kitten, pussy, baby, queen, cherubim, cake, lobster, wifie, Daisy, and her little jew … Gertrude was king, husband, hubbie, Mount fattie and fattuski”, and were inseparable from the day they met for nearly 4 decades until Gertrude’s death.

And yet.

Their relationship, perhaps the first mainstream relationship between two women, was … almost toxic by today’s standards? When they got married they decided Gertrude would be the husband, and Alice the wife - “Gertrude was to dictate and protect, Alice was to serve and please”, hardly the boundary-defying expansiveness associated with queer relations. Indeed Alice would in the upcoming years be her editor, secretary, housekeeper, and gatekeeper, a “band of electrified steel”. She was the jealous type - any person wanting to talk to Gertrude had to first get Alice’s approval; if they ever got too close, too friendly with Gertrude, one look from Alice and Gertrude would seclude, never talking to them again. Gertrude once wrote a manuscript with another woman she had an affair before Alice; upon finding out Alice destroyed all the letters and locked up the manuscript. And while the powerhouse was central to the 20th-century literary milieu, and hosted regular salons in Paris where Ernest Hemmingway, T. S. Elliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Picasso gathered, Alice was often delegated to entertain the wives, treated as “second-class citizens”.

And yet.

Gertrude Stein was widely respected and sought after, but she was seldom published. Her writing was opaque, Rose is a rose is a rose sounds poetic in a sentence, yet obtuse when it drags,

She was thinking in being one who was a different one in being one than he was in being one. Sound was coming out of her and she was knowing this thing. Sound had been coming out of him and she had been knowing this thing. She was thinking in being a different one than he was in having sound come out of her than came out of him. She was differing in being a different on. She was thinking about being a different one. She was thinking about that thing. She had sound coming out of her. She was knowing that thing. She had had sound coming out of her, she was knowing that thing. He had had sound coming out of him, she was knowing that thing. He had sound coming out of him, she was knowing this thing. Each one of the two was different from the other of them. Each one of them was knowing that thing. She was different from him in being one being living She was knowing that thing. She was different from him in having sound come out of her. She was thinking this thing. She was thinking in this thing. She had sound coming out of her. She was thinking in this thing. She had sound coming out of her. She was different from him. She had sound coming out of her. She was different in being one being one. She was knowing that thing.

…

It continued for 157 pages. Alice woke up every day, typed these pages, put them in a manuscript, and tried to sell it to publishers, who reviled the writing, rejecting book after book. This went on for 20 years. If she had doubts about Stein’s genius, she never showed.

Stein was fifty-seven, and still she did not have any lasting literary impact. Then she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. In it, Stein took Alice’s voice, so naturally “friends could hear her” in their heads. The opaque Gertrudism “I was charming I was delicate I was delicious” found no trace in her final manuscript, the sentences quip, her puctuations regular. It became an instant literary success, Alice and Gertrude became household names overnight.

And yet.

While Gertrude was writing Autobiography she wrestled with the thought of putting her “money-making” style out in the world, a compromise to her standards. She was afraid of their merged identity, that she would lose her own. Alice in the book was depicted as quiet and compliant, adoring Gertrude as God, with little hint of her ambition or temperament.

And yet.

*

It is hard to say what is Gertrude Stein’s lasting impacts on Western literature. Was she a genius or was she delulu? Was Alice’s belief in Stein’s genius founded, or was she just intoxicated with the lie? What about Gertrude & Alice? Maybe they were crazy and maybe they were toxic. But it reminds me of the quote when someone asks Gertrude if she is a lesbian & she says no, I just love Alice. Because reading about their lives I realize there is only a singular human being she could love, and she had loved, whose voice has fused in her in all these years doing life together. Our society seems to have certain shapes that require you to exist in, that are smooth and horizontal and uninteresting. But Alice & Gertrude over months and decades molded and pushed into one, a layered, jagged, textured object, that when you stumble upon you have to stop and puzzle even if you don’t understand, because you can’t help but notice how the two stood out in such sharp contrast with the flatness of the land.

Gertrude Stein’s influence on the 20th-century cultural milieu was undeniable. Picasso drew a portrait of her; Hemingway perfected her art of the continuous present. And yet her work was never properly understood & her most consequential novel ended up being about Alice B. Toklas. They were inseparable since they first met, Gertrude’s last breath was drawn with Alice by her side. Could you have separated her from her work from her love?

Modified from my Goodreads review. Let’s be friends on Goodreads!! Or reach out if you have book recommendations.

1. “Cows, some Steinian scholars surmise, are orgasms”. She also has a poem collection called Tender Buttons. Make no mistake, they are gay as hell.