Giving Life to a Legend

...author, "Dawn and the Darkest Houi In a private letter Sherwood Anderson said of Gertrude Stem, "I do not think her too important I do think she had an important thing to do, not tor the public, but tor the artist who happens to work with words as his material " Though Anderson had a point, his statement is a half-truth since what is important to artists—in words or otherwise—is of course bound eventually to be so to the public that follows their activities I would categorize Stein as one of those artists whose work is minor in that its content does not match the originality of its form, but who acquire an absorbing interest for their contemporaries and their successors because, as Oscar Wilde said of himself, they stand in symbolic relation to their age In other words, lacking the universality of the major artist, such figures reflect with a peculiar brightness the nature of their particular era Artists of this kind provide excellent material for the biographer The details we know of Shakespeare's life add little to our understanding of an achievement that is superb in its self-sufficiency Yet the work of a Gertrude Stem might easily come to enjoy little more than a tenuous afterlife m graduate seminars unless we see it in the context of its time and place Thus she is an excellent candidate tor the sort of biography that projects a period as well as a person, what the Victorians used to call a Lite and Times And that is precisely what James R Mellow has given us in his fascinating Charmed Circle A mere literary critic could not have done it, since much that has to be said of Stem can only be presented effectively by an art historian Mellow is well-suited by experience for the task, besides possessing a good ear for prose, he formerly edited Aits magazine and was The New Leader's art critic for close to seven years A biographer of Stem faces the formidable difficulty of penetrating the legend that began to grow up around her surprisingly early, before many people who knew of her had read much of her work The books on which she built her first repute sold merely a few hundred copies, and even when The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas became something of a popular success in 1930, it was hardly a bestseller I was 18 that year, living in a small English town where new books were hard to get and avant-garde books were practically unavailable, yet the myth and name of Gertrude Stein already had a talismanic attraction for me Until a copy of The Autobiography found its way into my provincial fastness, however, I had read only a few lines of her mockingly quoted by critics In fact, Stein possessed a compelling quality that drew unwilling attention even from those who found her work dangerous or just childish and crude That quality can be seen in the photographs of her solid Sumerian figure, it manifested itself in her ability to arouse friendships and devotions m people of no mean achievement, it appears to supply the inner reason for the adventures she and Leo, and later she and Alice B Toklas, underwent?including her astonishing survival of World War II, virtually unmolested, as an enemy alien and a Jew in German-occupied territory she obstinately refused to leave Significantly, Leo seemed to lose his luster as soon as he departed from Gertrude's company There was a kind of originating matriarchal fire about her that lesser personalities reflected like moons In the company of true originators like Picasso and Matisse?especially when the uneasy patron-artist relationship leveled into one of friendship—she seemed to be of comparable if not necessarily equal stature Indeed, in her book on Picasso, she describes the painter in terms that define the character of her own achievement as well as any critic has done "Picasso only sees something else, another reality Complications are always easy but another vision than that of all the world is very rare That is why geniuses are rare, to complicate things in a new way that is easy, but to see the things in a new way that is really difficult, everything prevents one, habits, schools, daily life, reason, necessities of daily life, intolerance, everything prevents one, m fact there are very few geniuses in the world " Stein did see things—and hear words—m a new way, even if her mode of expression was not as dramatically splendid as Picasso's Certainly the impediments of genius she cites with regard to Picasso are the ones whose overcoming takes up so much of Charmed Circle "Schools," if the word is expanded to mean upbringing in general, were always an impediment to Stein, they left her to the end a political conservative and something of a snob And the "necessities," or possibly rather the attractions, of daily life often combined with a natural indolence to clog the flow of work Yet mexorably over the years the piles of scribbled copybooks grew in the cupboards of rooms whose walls became ever more crowded with the great paintings of the age The life of this remarkable woman is a fascinating tale of vision forcing its way through obstacles created by the everyday self, and Mellow tells it well and thoroughly, enabling Gertrude Stem to step forward from the mists of her legend Moreover, in presenting Stein so amply, and in giving more of her due than have others to the elusive Alice B Toklas, Mellow does not neglect the rich background of her times Quite apart from its value as a study of the matriarch of the American avant-garde, Charmed Circle is a fine group portrait of American literary expatriates in the generation immediately following Henry James Though Gertrude wished to meet him, and more than once tried to, James always evaded her, perhaps it was consciously?and surely it was appropriately?that he thus marked the division between the generations...