← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
766 Gertrude Stein (with Francesca Wade) | Ruskin on the Only One Way to Get Art | My Last Book with Holly Baggett
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello. Gertrude Stein has always taken up an unusual and distinctive spot in the history of literature. While her bold and innovative writing has been polarizing since the moment it was published, her personal connections with the writers and painters of her day, hosted at her famous salon in Paris in the early 20th century, helped to seal her reputation as one of modernism's indispensable figures. Perhaps it's fitting that she was most famous for a kind of hybrid of the two. Her best selling memoir, which was a pioneering autobiography written in the voice of her longtime devoted partner, Alice B. Toklas. Our guest today, Francesca Waid, has written one of the more remarkable biographies of an author sorting through the mythologies surrounding Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with the help of some previously unexamined archival material. What new secrets did Franceska unearth? And how does that help us understand one of modernism's most fascinating and elusive writers, Francesca Wade, today on the History of Literature.
- [01:28]
Holly Baggett
Foreign.
- [01:34]
Jack Wilson
Here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. How is your 2026 going? I haven't heard much news from you, but I do know you're listening to this podcast, so that's a good thing, I guess, and I thank you for it. If you're listening to this in some other year, well, I hope the world has held up okay. Thank you for finding us, however, and whenever you did. So let's get straight to work. Our main topic today will be Gertrude Stein, but I wanted to start this in the true new year spirit by talking about art in general. One of the great things about the early 20th century and the modernist movement is that you see people supporting other people, other artists, all the time. Stein is an excellent example. She was not only an influence herself through her art, her writing, but through her promotions and her purchases. She helped painters and writers, including Picasso and Hemingway and many others. Why? Because she believed in art. And can't we all believe in that, in the power of it, the power of including art in our society because it makes us better people. It brings out the best in us. Kurt Vonnegut has a famous letter of advice to a classroom where he says, go home, draw a picture, make a poem, and then destroy it. Don't create something because it's an assignment or because you want to show it off to someone or make money from it or give it to someone who probably doesn't want it anyway. Do it because the act of creating something is good for the soul. And so is supporting the arts. Find someone who's trying their best to get it out there. A poet. They don't make much money. Or a struggling painter, or a theater company that could use a few ticket sales. An Independent Bookstore Speaking of which, I've been encouraged by the rise of independent bookstores, the resurrection, you might say, of independent bookstores. And I want to do more in 2026 to help them. If you are an independent bookstore owner or employee, reach out, tell me about your store and we'll see what we can do to help. Or, if you're a patron of one that you love, maybe you go there regularly, or not quite as often as you'd like. But it's a good place. You feel good about it, and you feel like sharing with others why that is. What are they doing out there to make the world a better place? Well, shoot me a message ackwilsonauthormail.com or visit our contact page@historyofliterature.com and send me a message that way. Okay, here's something I came across the other day as I was preparing for an upcoming episode on John Ruskin with our old friend Bob Blaisdell. So a passage that Ruskin wrote, delivered as a speech, and I liked it. I wanted to share it with you. So here we go. This is John Ruskin telling us there's only one way to get good art. Only one way. Don't you want to know what that way is? So listen to this. It was delivered at the Cambridge School of art on October 29, 1858. If you want really good work such as will be acknowledged by all the world, there is but one way of getting it, and that is a difficult one. You may offer any premium you choose for it, but you will find it can't be done for premiums. You may send for patterns to the Antipodes, but you will find it can't be done upon patterns. You may lecture on the principles of art to every school in the kingdom, and you will find it can't be done upon principles. You may wait patiently for the progress of the age, and you will find your art is unprogressive, or you may set yourselves impatiently to urge it by the inventions of the age, and you will find your chariot of art entirely immovable, either by screw or paddle. There's no way of getting good art, I repeat, but one at once the simplest and the most difficult, namely to enjoy it. Examine the history of nations, and you will find this great fact clear and unmistakable on the front of it that good art has only been produced by nations who rejoiced in it, fed themselves with it as if it were bread, basked in it as if it were sunshine, shouted at the sight of it, danced with the delight of it, quarreled for it, fought for it, starved for it, did, in fact, precisely the opposite with it of what we want to do with it. They made it to keep and we to sell. Hmm. They made it to keep and we to sell. So let's skip our commercial break. Lol. That would have been rich. Instead, we'll go straight to our discussion of Gertrude Stein. And then after that, after we hear from Francesca. Wait, about that. We'll hear from Holly Baggett, who will stop by to discuss her choice for the last book she will ever read. Francesca Wade is next. Okay. Joining me now is Francesca Wade, who is the author of Square Five Writers in London between the Wars. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She's here today to discuss her new book, Gertrude An Afterlife. Francesca Waid. Welcome to the history of literature.
- [07:21]
Francesca Wade
Thank you for having me.
- [07:24]
Jack Wilson
So the American Gertrude Stein said she went to Paris to kill the 19th century. What did she mean by that?
- [07:32]
Francesca Wade
I think it meant a lot of things for her. I mean, Stein was born in 1874, so she's very much a creature of the 19th century. But I think from quite a young age, she was kind of chafing to escape the confines of her upbringing and of the world that she kind of felt she'd been born into. And Stein was kind of pushing boundaries from the start. She was one of the first women to go to what became Harvard at that point or became Radcliffe. It was the Harvard annex. And she studied psychology under William James. So I think was already kind of seeking new ways of understanding the world and our place in it. She moved to Paris in 1903, following her older brother, and began collecting modern art by people like Picasso and Matisse, who were already creating totally new forms of visual representation. And Stein wanted to do something totally new in literature. She later remembered sitting for a portrait by Picasso, who is on the verge of creating the Cubism style. And meanwhile, Stein was writing her set of three novellas, which she called Three Lives. And she later described that book as the first step out of the 19th century and into the 20th. So I think for her, killing the 19th century was also a kind of doing away with ideas of kind of linear narrative and progress that she felt had kind of characterised old ways of looking at the world and was kind of breaking them apart and trying to do something new and exciting and innovative.
- [09:08]
Jack Wilson
Right, right. So there's this personal element of it, of a world in the 19th century that says women can only do X or that imposes boundaries on people or is maybe. I mean, the cliche of the Victorian era is that they're moral police and that kind of thing. And so she's kind of against that. But also she sees the 19th century as being tied to a kind of literature that she wants to go beyond in the way that Picasso and others were taking the visual arts into new areas.
- [09:46]
Francesca Wade
Yes, I think that's exactly right. I mean, she loved 19th century literature. Henry James was really one of her heroes, and her first works very much kind of emulated his style and, you know, had characters and realist narratives, but that's exactly what she began to try and kind of chafe against and expand. And her novel, for example, the Making of Americans, which she worked on over 10 years, her first decade in Paris, between about 1903 and 1913, I think, really shows that kind of process of transitioning from 19th to 20th century. It starts out as a realist novel in the style of a sort of grand, almost Russian style, sort of 19th century epic with generations of a single family. And yet the narrative spirals away from that starting point as Stein's kind of preoccupations change. And it becomes really a study of the human mind and of psychology and of Stein's own efforts to kind of chart the way people speak and relate to each other sort of internally rather than externally. She wanted to write, she said, a history of everyone who ever lived. And so the novel is a kind of redefinition of the novel in its own form, over a thousand pages, as Stein's narrator kind of confronts the enormity of the project she's trying to do and even confronts its failure. But really, I think that this, for Stein, was the kind of starting point of a. Of a literary career that devolved many times over its course, but was always, always engaged in doing something new.
- [11:25]
Jack Wilson
Right. Well, you say. I've got a quote here from your book where you say her work, spurred by her scientific background, ask questions that push language beyond its limits. How does perception work? How do words make meaning? What if writing set out not to describe the world, but to embody the very essence of people, places, objects, existence? And, you know, sometimes works, whether they're works of writing or works of visual art that. That seek to break boundaries, are really trying to force us to ask questions about the nature of art or the nature of language and the nature of perception and that kind of thing. Was that the extent of her goal is that where she was was pointing toward with her experimental fiction? Or did she believe that this was a way to convey life and all of the goals? Because all the goals that a writer like Tolstoy might have, to take a 19th century example, would be to talk about who are we as human beings and how do we relate to one another? And the storytelling is about families and about individuals who are learning things and growing and that kind of thing. Was Stein trying to do that with her experimental writing, or was she just trying to make us understand that fiction can be deceptive or that the way we understand art is something worth exploring?
- [12:56]
Francesca Wade
I think Stein. Her scientific background, I think, was really important to her. She went on from Harvard to Johns Hopkins University, where she was one of the first women to enroll in its medical school. And she spent quite a long time kind of studying the brain stem and the ways in which we process language kind of internally and neurologically. And I think Stein was. I don't think her work really has a kind of moral dimension. I think she's interested in exploring, particularly the nature of perception and time to really see how, you know, on quite a sort of deep level how humans and minds kind of relate to the world and to everything around us. Yeah, she wanted to convey kind of as closely as possible the experience of perceiving or apprehending something. Something, whether a person or an object. And I think she felt that her work was an effort to really kind of get beneath the surface of the kind of essence of people or objects that she was exploring. I mean, she. Quite early on, she spent a long time working on a series of texts she called Portraits, which took as their starting point a person in her orbit, whether a friend or even someone she'd sort of seen on the street. And she tried to kind of convey their. The essence of their kind of personality or their mannerisms or their character in words, often repeated words, which she sought to kind of divest words of their literary associations by using them again and again until they kind of meant something that was totally specific to the moment and kind of captured the reader or listener's attention sort of almost in the moment of Stein's writing. I've kind of. I've started to think of her really as a sort of philosopher of language rather than, you know, a. A sort of, you know, a writer in the sense of Tolstoy, say, in That I think she was trying to use words. She was trying to really question how we use words and what role language plays and wanted to use words, you know, not necessarily to convey grand truths about the characters she'd invented or to describe events, but to use them almost for their own sake as kind of living things in the world with us. You know, what is language? How do we use it to explain and relate and describe and. Yeah. Could literature do something sort of beyond that? I think Stein's writing practice was, in a way, a very private kind of interrogation of reality.
- [15:31]
Jack Wilson
Right, right. But she. I mean, she's also in an era where this is also being explored by philosophers, but she kind of views herself as being in a literary tradition. She says, I have been the creative literary mind of the century. Think of the Bible and Homer. Think of Shakespeare and think of me. So she clearly. Where did she think she was most successful? Was there a work that she was particularly proud of and kind of said, well, this is. This is my Iliad. This is my Hamlet, so to speak.
- [16:03]
Francesca Wade
Interesting. Yeah, I guess. I think the Making of Americans was a very, very important text to her. It was really one of her earlier works. And I think she saw it as her kind of grand epic in which she, I guess, began to kind of work out the concerns that were going to carry her throughout her career. And it is a novel full of people. I mean, Stein, we're talking about her work about words and language, but really, I think her great fascination was people. So in that sense, I think, yeah, there's definitely a sort of emotional dimension to her work. It was all about working out how people tick, really. And portraiture was a subject kind of throughout her career. And she. I think, you know, I think she was very frustrated that, say, Ulysses, James Joyce's epic, which was written actually after the Making of Americans, but published before it because Stein really struggled to find publishers for her work. I think she felt that what she was doing was kind of, you know, on a par with what he was doing. And Stein was extremely well read. I mean, she. She'd read her way through the sort of entirety of 18th and 19th century literature, at least as. As she says it, as a sort of teenager and in San Francisco. So I definitely think she. She saw herself working in a literary tradition, for sure.
- [17:27]
Jack Wilson
Did she view her work as solipsistic in the sense of she was trying to give readers a glimpse into the mind of Gertrude Stein? Or did she believe that she had found a way of conveying some kind of objective truth about Things in the world or a kind of glimpse into the mind and how it worked, whether it was her mind or just a human mind in general.
- [17:57]
Francesca Wade
Yeah, that's such an interesting question. At one point she says, like a quote of hers I love, she says, I am I no longer when I see. Which I think for her means that when she's writing, in a way, she's trying to kind of rise above herself in this kind of work. She sort of isn't writing from a personal perspective, although her work was always totally engaged with her own consciousness. And it comes out very much of one person's mind and what she saw around her and her own moods and so on. But I think it's interesting because Stein became very famous in 1932 for a book in a style completely unlike the work that she had been devoting herself to for 30 years. The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is a very personal book all about. I mean, it doesn't use Stein's voice. It uses the voice of her partner to. To look at Gertrude Stein from outside. And it's all about Stein and the people around them and a very specific perspective and milieu. And Stein became very famous for this book. It was a huge bestseller. I mean, her earlier work often either hadn't been printed or had been printed, but had been kind of resoundingly mocked by critics. And suddenly she was receiving all this acclaim. And that's the point, actually, at which she. She uses that line, I am I Not any longer when I see. Because she found this celebrity quite disconcerting and actually made it quite difficult for her to do the kind of concentrated work that she'd been doing to this point, because she felt too conscious of herself as an individual with an identity. I think her earlier work was more about trying to seek, if not a sort of objective truth about the world. But, yeah, to kind of transcend her own sort of personal experience through a very sustained observation in an attempt to really kind of get as close as possible to whatever it was she was perceiving.
- [20:00]
Jack Wilson
You have a great quote from her friend Thornton Wilder, who very diplomatically said that Stein pursued her aims, quote, with such conviction and intensity that occasionally she forgot that the results could be difficult to others, end quote. So, I mean, did she accept this? If you had put that assertion to her, would she have said, well, this is a necessary aspect of being ahead of my time or being a cutting edge genius? Or would she have said, well, that's obviously a flaw then, because I want people to understand what I'm doing. And. And I think my art should be bestselling, not just the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but I think all the other works I've been doing should be as famous and I should be as well regarded for it as Picasso is for his paintings, for example.
- [20:58]
Francesca Wade
Yes, I think this was a tricky and kind of fascinating paradox for Stein that on the one hand, yeah, her work was so sort of private and really came out of her own kind of internal thought processes, and yet she did really want readers for it and wanted recognition for doing something truly radical. And yet that was hard to find because, yeah, as you said, the work can be difficult to read. And Stein didn't like to explain it or really give readers too many sort of clues into it, I think, because she felt the text needs to stand on its own. And if you start to explain what you're thinking when you write it, it'll make readers feel like there is some kind of code to be decoded, or that you can only read it if you understand it, or that there's some sort of sense to be made out of it that you're not getting. And Stein's work, it sort of sets itself up against sense or understanding. I think once you sort of grasp that, I think it's really unlocks the reading experience of Stein, because in a way, it's asking the reader to find a new way of reading. Not to try and follow a narrative or to sort of know exactly what's going on, but in a way to kind of attune to the words and sort of see what comes out of it for you. In a way, I think Stein's writing, it sort of needs activation by a reader, if that makes sense. It's almost. It's an invitation to look at the world through the words on the page and be in the moment that what she called the continuous present. To kind of stop there with Stein and kind of see what happens. And when Stein went on her long lecture tour of America in 1934, where she was greeted everywhere she went as a celebrity, but also repeatedly asked, what on earth is your work or about? And she always refused to really answer, but she said, if you enjoy it, you understand it. And she goes on to say, if you don't enjoy it, what's all the fuss about? She also says somewhere in the autobiography, she said, my sentences do get under their skin, which is another Stein line that I really love, because I think it's true that actually the experience of reading Stein can be one of total bewilderment but it can also be one of kind of intoxication. And, you know, once you kind of. Once you sort of get into it and you start to sort of enjoy it. Yeah. You can find that her sort of sentence style really has a grip on you. And I think it's just. Yeah, about. About letting go of a desire to make sense. Because actually, the work is really a questioning of that impulse and of what. What sense is.
- [23:58]
Jack Wilson
It almost reminds me of what they say about being hypnotized, where certain people can't. Because they can't give up that sense of control, or they can't just, you know, let someone have it. Because when I'm reading a book by Tolstoy, I feel like he is in complete control. And I'm willing to kind of surrender, you know, my doubts or skepticism because I just think, he's creating this world. He's the master of it. He is going to deliver to me exactly what he wants me to feel or think or, you know, where my eye should be.
- [24:34]
Francesca Wade
Yeah.
- [24:35]
Jack Wilson
And to. To appreciate Stein, maybe that's the biggest hurdle to get over is you feel like, well, is she really in control? Is. Is this something that she knows exactly how I'm going to respond to this and what I'm going to take from it, or is she doing something that's kind of out there and is provocative, but maybe it's not something where she's totally in control of what my response is going to be.
- [25:01]
Francesca Wade
Yeah, exactly. And I think she would say that, yeah, that your response can be whatever you want it to be. And, yeah, she's putting the words together very precisely, I think. I mean, Stein cared a lot about language and about rhythms and about words. And yet, I think in a way, what's exciting about her work is that she's not necessarily in control. She doesn't draft and redraft. She doesn't necessarily have a sense of where a sentence is going to go, because she's trying to disrupt those sentence structures that we're used to. She wouldn't want anyone else to be able to complete a sentence or say, of course, this word or this kind of word follows that word. She put words together based not on grammatical structures, but on kinds of associations that really only she, you know, in her mind, you know, even intuitively, could explain. Often, you know, she put words together based on their sound or even the way they look on the page. And she would repeat words, kind of testing them, stretching them in different directions. You know, sometimes there'd be little kind of, you know, internal rhymes or word plays or resonances. And yeah, words would sort of jump one to the other. Yeah. Divorced from the kind of expected pathways that they would take. I mean, in a way, I think she's almost trying to rewire the way that our brains process language so that we're sort of short circuiting the kind of expected ways that sentences usually go and, you know, saying what happens if we put words together in a way they'd never been put together before. And that's why I think her work is always so surprising. And the process of reading it can be so surprising too, because it's so rare for us to, to kind of spend time with words that generate new kinds of thoughts in ourselves.
- [26:56]
Jack Wilson
Okay, let's take a quick break and come back with more from Francesca Wade.
- [27:15]
Francesca Wade
Foreign.
- [27:22]
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- [29:04]
Jack Wilson
Okay, we're back. So Francesca, let's talk about your book. But first let's talk about your experience with Gertrude Stein. When did you start reading her works or, or when did you learn about her? What drew you to her?
- [29:16]
Francesca Wade
Initially, I guess I was, I was really drawn to her through her, her kind of outsized legend. You know, I'd read the autobiography of Vallis B. Toklas know, which tells the story. You know, that is probably what comes to mind for many People when they hear the name Gertrude Stein, which is Bohemian Paris in the twenties.
- [29:36]
Jack Wilson
Oh yeah. I mean, people love that era and she is really at the heart of it and she is really the nexus between what was going on in painting and what was going on in writing. And you get stories of, in Hemingway's movable feast of going over to her. Her apartment and looking at the paintings by Cezanne and you know, it's really. She is undeniably a central figure in the history of literature and especially the literature of that lost. I mean, she coined the term lost generation, so. She did.
- [30:13]
Francesca Wade
Yeah, I think it was really. I mean, she and her brother started collecting art shortly after they moved to Paris and they had a small inheritance kind of invested by their brother in San Francisco after their parents had died. And it was relatively modest. So they could only really. They bought what they could afford, which at that point was work by kind of new up and coming artists who hadn't achieved much recognition or sometimes achieved quite the opposite. And that happened to be people like Picasso and Matisse who very quickly people started to flock to the Steins apartment because this was the only place you could really see work by these kind of new, exciting artists were doing things totally new with form and colour. And I think it was really after the First World War when a kind of new generation of Americans, Hemingway Fitzgerald, started to come to Paris and kind of beat a path to the Rue de Fleurus. And first Stein and her brother and then after Alice B. Toklas moved in and Leo Stein moved out. Stein and Toklas held these kind of regular Saturday night open houses where anyone could come and look at the art. And increasingly people came to see Gertrude Stein and to talk to her and, you know, maybe to show her their manuscripts or their paintings or just to kind of see her in action. She became a sort of cult figure. She struck this, you know, very kind of familiar sight in Paris. She used to wear sort of long brown corduroy robes and the hairstyle sort of changed and she's started to wear these quite kind of flamboyant waistcoats.
- [31:51]
Jack Wilson
It does feel like as we talked about before, that there was something a bit. She was a bit conflicted about that because it was kind of like, well, I'm as famous as I believe I should be, but maybe not for quite the thing that I think I should be famous for.
- [32:08]
Francesca Wade
Yes, exactly. I think Stein and Toklas really sort of cultivated this legend. And I think the autobiography of Alice B. Douchlas is in a way is Stein really setting down that myth of herself, which I think was carefully couched to try and to sort of shore up this fame. But really what she wanted was recognition for her writing. And she hoped, I think, that the autobiography would bring in new readers who were excited about her work and also kind of sell it to publishers. But that always backfired, really. And her work, even from the beginning, got a lot of attention. But usually it was pretty clear that people writing articles about her hadn't really read her work or engaged with what it was trying seriously to do, but really were just intrigued by her kind of. Her outsized personality, the sort of arrogance of her continually insisting she was a genius.
- [33:07]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, that was probably my number one takeaway when I read the autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, apart from just liking the whole. Just being in that world and just my own affection for that time period and everything. But the idea that she's writing an autobiography on behalf of someone else and then having that person say things like, I've only been lucky. I've been lucky enough to know two real geniuses in my life, and one of them was Pablo Picasso and the other is Gertrude Stein, or however it is that she puts it. You just think, well, what a. What a neat trick this is, that Gertrude Stein is describing herself as a genius in the book, that she's ghostwriting for someone else. So.
- [33:52]
Francesca Wade
Exactly. Well, and every and every genius needs a subservient wife who will enable that genius, I think, is the message.
- [34:02]
Jack Wilson
But I mean, to take Stein's side for a moment here, she was surrounded with people who were kind of becoming recognized as geniuses, but who hadn't been early in their career. So it is a kind of. She probably could look at her writings and say, well, it's just a matter of time before this is going to break through and people will understand it the way they didn't understand Cubism at first, or the way they didn't understand, you know, the other artistic movements at first.
- [34:32]
Francesca Wade
Yeah, exactly. I think Stein did have a very strong sense when her work was being kind of derided or ignored, that its time would come. And in fact, in 1920, she gave a lecture at Oxford and Cambridge universities called Composition as Explanation, which was the first time she'd really offered anything close to a sort of artistic manifesto. And in the course of that, she made that argument that truly radical work won't necessarily be appreciated in its own time because it will seem ugly at first and later, you know, become kind of assimilated into the culture. And it will start to look beautiful or even passe. But she says the creator of the new art is always an outlaw before being a classic. And I think at that point, Stein saw herself really as something of an outlaw, but kind of. I mean, in fact, to some extent, she was obviously trying to convince herself, but also, I think, believed that she would be considered a classic one day. And in a way, the story of my book is the story of. Of her efforts to make sure that that wish came true both in her lifetime and beyond, to make sure that her work would find the readers who would see its importance.
- [35:49]
Jack Wilson
Right, Right. Okay, so let's tell the story of Leon Katz and his notebook. So who was Leon Katz?
- [35:57]
Francesca Wade
Leon Katz was a graduate student at Columbia in the early 1950s. Stein had died in 1946, and she left her enormous archive to Yale University. So over the course of the 1930s, and even after her death, she and then Toklas sent to Yale boxes and boxes of everything Stein had ever written. Her manuscripts, her working notebooks, her letters, you know, incidental material from their apartment. And pretty quickly, that material was opened up to researchers who wanted to look at it. And I think Stein had hoped this would happen. This was part of her plan for her work eventually to be taken seriously, that she expected people would want to write about it and study it and pull out unpublished things and get them into print and indeed write biographies about her life. And in a way, in her archive, she'd created the material for them to do so, and I think had also left some. Some kind of clues and red herrings for future sort of detectives to pick up. And Leon Katz had gone to the archive with the intention of writing a sort of dissertation about Stein's early work, that kind of transition from 19th century realism to what he called her kind of monumental aesthetic awakening into the kind of totally new forms of writing that she'd be known for. And as he was looking through the early drafts for the Making of Americans, he came across a packet of notebooks which he expected would just be drafts for the novel, but actually looked more like a kind of a diary that Stein had kept during the decade in which she wrote the book. And it was full of reflections on people in her life, her working out what it means to be an artist, comparing herself to Picasso, thinking about the different paths they were on, and sort of working out her ideas about human character that would kind of propel the novel.
- [38:04]
Jack Wilson
Right. So in a lot of ways, it sounds like the kind of thing that she was resistant to telling people about in interviews she was putting down on the page. And Leon Katz was able to find it in these notebooks, which nobody knew about.
- [38:18]
Francesca Wade
Exactly. I think as soon as he started to look through these notebooks and then eventually to kind of transcribe and annotate their contents, he realized that this was a kind of a. A key to the novel because it exposed the kind of backbone structure that in a way, had become hidden in the finished text, but it exposed the kind of thought process that had put the novel into being and gave enormous insight into Stein's mind and life over the course of that very formative decade during which he was writing it. So it was fascinating both from a biographical perspective, because he could instantly see that there was stuff there about her brother, stuff there about Alice B. Toklas, and lots of stuff about people whose names he didn't know at all, who had been kind of erased from the narrative of her life that she'd put out in the autobiography. And he was intrigued by that, but he was really a literary scholar rather than a biographer and was kind of primarily keen to use this to explore the making of the Making of Americans, to see exactly how Stein had kind of transformed herself from the sort of emerging 19th century realist into this radical writer. And he could instantly see that the novel had gone through many different stages as she kind of moved towards her new vision. But there were so many questions brought up by these notebooks that he knew that really the only way he could get some context to kind of interpret them was by talking to Alice B. Toklas, who had been stein's partner for 40 years and who now lived on as the kind of steward or gatekeeper of Stein's legacy. And so Katz spent four months interviewing Tocque in Paris.
- [40:10]
Jack Wilson
Why did she agree to that? Was it because she saw it as, well, here's a serious person. This is the kind of person that Gertrude Stein was always hoping would take up her cause and understand more. Or was she worried about, well, there might be things in there about me and I want to make sure the record is straight and that kind of thing.
- [40:33]
Francesca Wade
I think a little bit of both. Since Stein's death, many biographers had approached Toklas and had wanted to talk to her, and she always kind of battered them away. She wanted people to pay attention to Stein's writing and she directed them back to the archive and to the published books and insisted, you know, there's nothing that I can tell you that will help for an understanding of Gertrude Stein's work which. Which of course, was very disappointing to the biographers, who really were wanting juicy stories about bohemian Paris and wanted Toklas's side of the story. Stein had written her autobiography in Toklas's voice, and everyone was sure that Toklas had much more to say, that she was a student.
- [41:14]
Jack Wilson
Maybe she'd say, well, in retrospect, I really only knew one genius.
- [41:23]
Francesca Wade
She would definitely not say that.
- [41:24]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so here's what gets really exciting. And you note, in a kind of a famous book written by Janet Malcolm in 2007, she said Katz's notes of his interviews with Toklas in Paris remain locked in his possession. No scholar has ever seen them. Enter Francesca Wade. How did you. How did you come to be the first researcher to examine them?
- [41:52]
Francesca Wade
Yeah, well, yeah, Janet Malcolm kind of picked up the story of Leon Katz in a New Yorker article she wrote, published. And I think it was about 2003. And at this point, Katz had been working on this material for 50 years. You know, he'd come home from these interviews with Toklas and had really spent the next half century working on a book that was going to incorporate her insights, and which Stein scholars, of which there were now rather a lot, all assumed was going to totally kind of blow open the field and revolutionize our understanding of her process and give huge amounts of new material on her life. But it didn't come out. And so Janet Malcolm sort of wrote about this and tried to meet him and didn't. And I had finished reading her book, which was published in 2007 as a book, and I just kind of wondered what had happened next. Had Cats ever published this book? Had he responded to Janet Malcolm's portrayal of him? And it turned out he had died in 2017 at the age of 97, and his papers had been sold to the Beinecke Library at Yale, which is where Stein's own archive is. And it was there, but it seemed that no one yet either didn't know it was there or no one perhaps had gone to see it. And so I went along in September 2019. At that point, I wasn't expecting to be writing a book about it. I just wanted to, you know, to sort of see this. This whole Holy Grail of material and see what was there. And at that point, the material hadn't yet been cataloged. It was still in kind of haphazard boxes, you know, as it had sort of come into the library. So it was, yeah, very kind of them to let me see it. And I took lots of photos and kind of went away and tried to. To kind of make sense of it. And it's an amazing archive because it really is the record of the. Of that 50 years of scholarship. There is the notebook in which he recorded his interviews with Toklas while he was there in Paris in 1952. And then there it is typed out on index cards and then eventually typed up on Word documents. And he kind of finished this huge book shortly before he died. And it was really thrilling to be able to see his material both for his work on Stein and for Toklas's voice to come through. Because Toklas didn't give many interviews. She wrote a cookbook, very famously, and she wrote a memoir of life with Stein, both of which were very much sort of, you know, didn't let the reader into her innermost feelings. The autobiography in particular, critics tended to be sort of disappointed that it really kind of regurgitated the anecdotes of Stein's autobiography, which I think really was talkless, keeping readers or keeping prurient readers at a distance. She, I think, was a very private person. But so to see her talking to cats, reminiscing about early years in Paris, explaining who lots of people were, and really talking openly and frankly about her life with Stein was just kind of amazing and made me think there's something new here to say about Stein and particularly about their relationship. That was such a famous, sort of storied, kind of legendary relationship, but I think one which its public performance, I think, was very different to its kind of private life.
- [45:31]
Jack Wilson
Before we talk about what we know now that we didn't know before, how does Alice B. Toklas come across in these notebooks? Does she seem like she's a reliable narrator and she's. Is she providing a corrective to some of the legend making and so on? Or does she corroborate things? Or does she. Does she seem like she has an agenda at all? Or does she seem like she's just trying to get the truth out and let the consequences fall where they may?
- [46:03]
Francesca Wade
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, Toklas was extraordinarily devoted to Stein in her lifetime and beyond. And I think what's so fascinating about these interviews with cats is the kind of slippages, I guess, between the sort of official narrative that she and Stein had kind of built up together and the kind of memories that had solidified for her over the course of a lifetime of both telling stories, but also keeping certain things hidden. But Katz's material, the notebooks that he'd found at the archive, I think, really prodded new memories and brought into question quite a few of the stories that Toklas had, the familiar stories that she was used to telling. I mean, other friends who visited her and who just asked her to talk about her life remembered. She would almost recite sort of verbatim passages from the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. So, so much had those stories become the kind of official memories, the shared memories, that visitors weren't sure if this was sort of all a joke or if Stein had really kind of written down Toklas's version of events in the autobiography, or if Toklas had now taken on what Stein had put in her mouth and was kind of recapitulating it almost as a way to refuse to let anyone in. And so seeing her talk to. To Katz, who was bringing up all kinds of things that she had perhaps forgotten or not known or even kind of repressed from their shared past, I think was, yeah, an insight into the way that her kind of memory worked and in a way, to the way that their legend was constructed and sort of maintained between them. And I found it very moving to see that devotion to see Stein be sort of tested and kind of come out strengthened, but also poignant to see the compromises and sacrifices that Toklas had made for her partner's career be sort of subtly acknowledged, really, for the first time.
- [48:13]
Jack Wilson
Right, right. You can imagine this being the case with anyone. I mean, if you were. You know, you often hear about things that people discover after someone, a loved one dies, and they start looking through old letters or they start looking through a journal or a diary or something, and then suddenly, you know, two people who had been married for a long time suddenly have to deal with, oh, I didn't realize that my lifetime partner actually went, you know, had an affair or went through a period of extreme doubt or something that I thought was a happy time in our life turns out not to have been for that.
- [48:53]
Francesca Wade
That kind of thing.
- [48:54]
Jack Wilson
And when you're faced with that, then it does jar loose either memories or a kind of. Well, let me put that in context, or let me try to understand what this loved one of mine must have been thinking at that time, because here's some context I can provide to help us all make sense of what that person put down in those notebooks at that time.
- [49:17]
Francesca Wade
Yeah, exactly. I'm just so interested in the ways in which biography is written, I guess. And I think that's why I sort of wanted to structure this book in the kind of two halves. And the first half really tells Stein's life as she told it and as the kind of public sort of record went. And so, yeah, what I sort of felt came out after her death through things being discovered in the archive. And Toklas kind of subtly recasting the narrative sort of shows that people are never kind of monolithic, you know, we never see them from all angles. We don't know everything about each other. And, you know, usually, usually biography sort of tells a kind of linear story, sort of suggests that, you know, this is. This is the person, you know, this is who they are and what we know about them. And I guess I wanted, yeah, as you say, to sort of expose the kind of cracks in that and show that people aren't always as we seem to, and that a story of someone's life is always made up of the material they leave behind or the sides of themselves they choose to show and to slightly challenge those narratives, just as Katz's interviews, I think, challenged talkless narratives.
- [50:33]
Jack Wilson
So I want to ask this last question in three parts, but I'm aware that you could probably talk for three hours about this, an hour for each of these parts. But what I'm interested in is kind of what you learned about Stein that you didn't know before about her biography and just her being a physical person living in the world, and what you learned about her as an artist and what she thought about her own work and what she was doing and her project and so on. And then thirdly, just wondering if there's any insights that you have into her literary works themselves that you understand because of this research you've done into the cat's notebooks and so on. So let's start with the biography. Are there things that, you know, are there really surprising revelations that came out of this, or is it. Does it confirm anything that people had doubts about before or what. What do you know now about her life that you didn't know before you started?
- [51:34]
Francesca Wade
I mean, I know a lot more, I think. Yeah, as you say, I could talk for several hours, but I think aside from, you know, extra details and information and, you know, new anecdotes and new stories that I've gleaned from this new material, I guess what really came out most strongly for me was a kind of humanizing factor. I think that, you know, Stein up till now had somehow felt like quite a distant figure, you know, a bit of a caricature and, you know, the kind of well known, sort of well worn anecdotes about her life had become almost sort of unreal. And so I think, yeah, what really came out for me in spending more time with this material was a sense just of her as a sort of real person operating in a hostile world.
- [52:25]
Jack Wilson
That is interesting because she does seem so formidable. And I don't know if this is. Maybe this is too cliche. Push back against this if you want, but there is that famous example of the portrait that Picasso had painted of her. And she kind of looked at it and said, well, that doesn't look like my face. It looks like a mask, and it doesn't look like me. And he said, it will, yeah, or you will. Yeah, you will look like this.
- [52:54]
Francesca Wade
It will become a mask. I mean, maybe that was rather prescient.
- [52:57]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, yeah, right.
- [52:58]
Francesca Wade
And I guess in a way, I wanted not exactly to unmask, but maybe to sort of see her more as a kind of cubist portrait, you know, from different angles.
- [53:08]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [53:09]
Francesca Wade
Colorful and surprising.
- [53:11]
Jack Wilson
Okay, so how about these things? And I don't know if this comes out of the notebooks where Katz is recording his conversations with Toklas, or if this comes out of just the notebooks themselves where Stein is putting down her own thoughts and kind of her own work, but do you see her differently as an artist?
- [53:30]
Francesca Wade
I think. I mean, I think in a way, Stein sort of teaches you how to read her. And I think the more time you spend reading her work, in a way, the, you know, the better you kind of get a sort of intuitive sense of her methods and what she's doing. And another great thing about reading Stein is the extent of kind of brilliant Stein scholarship out there. So many sort of ingenious readings of her work. I particularly loved reading poets kind of writing about Stein and what she's meant to them. She has been so important to so many different poets and different kind of schools of poetry and of visual art and music and dance as well. And I sort of end the book with the kind of downtown New York scene of the 50s and 60s, which I think was really where her work and its ideas started to take hold among people like John Cage, say, who weren't so interested in her biography and in the Legend, but were interested in. Interested in what possibilities her work kind of generated for them. And so, yeah, that was. I think, one of the revelations for me was seeing how Stein's ideas kind of took hold in later generations.
- [54:41]
Jack Wilson
Was there anything you read that made you think, oh, I really need to go back and reread X, that now I'm going to have a New way. It's going to open new doors when I read stuff such and such for the next time.
- [54:54]
Francesca Wade
Yeah, all the time. I think a great thing about Stein is that there's always more to read and new ways to read it. I mean, we've been talking mostly about her kind of early ish work, which is kind of the period I think I'm most drawn to. But I also love her later works. Her memoir, Wars I have Seen, for example, which describes living in France during the Second World War. And her memoir, Paris France, which is a sort of meditation on. On kind of identity and Paris and her time there. And, yeah, I think those kind of later, more sort of introspective, kind of more personal works have so many depths to kind of plumb. Every time I read them, I see new things in them. So, yeah, I think that's another exciting thing about Stein, that he can always go back to her work and find new things in it and new ways of seeing from it.
- [55:47]
Jack Wilson
So when the hypnotist Gertrude Stein is standing on the stage saying, I need a volunteer, your hand is going up.
- [55:55]
Francesca Wade
Yes, that's right.
- [55:57]
Jack Wilson
Okay. Well, the book is called Gertrude An Afterlife. Francesca Wade, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [56:05]
Francesca Wade
Thank you so much for talking. I really enjoyed it.
- [56:24]
Jack Wilson
New Year, same extra value meals at McDonald's. So now get two snack wraps plus fries and a medium soft drink for.
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- [56:34]
Jack Wilson
Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for delivery. And finally, today we hear from Holly Baggett, who was also here for a discussion of modernism and the modernist period. After she and I discussed the women behind the incredibly important journal called the Little Review, which Gertrude Stein appeared in. By the way, I asked Holly a special question. Okay. I'm joined now by Holly Baggett, author of Making no Compromise, which tells the story of two openly queer founders and editors of the Little Review, which profoundly shaped the course of modernism. Holly, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [57:45]
Holly Baggett
Well, gee, guess what it is. I'll give you one guess. It would be Ulysses.
- [57:54]
Jack Wilson
I was going to say we talked a lot about Ulysses when we talked about the Little Review. They were the first publication to print it in America. They, the founders, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, wound up on trial for obscenity, and it caused quite a Stir. So that's a book that you return to, I guess. Yeah.
- [58:14]
Holly Baggett
You know, years ago, when there were American hostages being held in Beirut, I read a story how one hostage was told he could have one book for his captivity, which lasted seven years, and he chose the Bible. And that led me to think, gee, if I were in that situation, what book would I want? And I'd want Ulysses because it would still keep my mind alive. You know, he said there's so many riddles and puzzles and wordplay and this and that. I mean, it's an endlessly fascinating, deep dive into the minds of these fascinating characters. And that's why I would pick it. It would makes you think, it challenges you and you wrestle with it, and that's a good thing.
- [58:59]
Jack Wilson
Now, I'm with you. We have had a few guests who have chosen Finnegan's wake, which to me would be a bridge too far, I think. I probably wouldn't want that at that point in my life. Right.
- [59:13]
Holly Baggett
That would. If you were a hostage, it would drive you insane, I guess.
- [59:18]
Jack Wilson
Right. You'd want to ask somebody the questions, or you'd want some kind of guide to help you through it. To me, that's where the meaning. It's a little too difficult to access. But Ulysses, I agree. You could. You can kind of go back and forth, and you can. I've never heard anyone who's read it multiple times who hasn't said that it is. They. They find profoundly different things every time they read it.
- [59:48]
Holly Baggett
Right. And the scholarship on Ulysses is just enormous and incredible, and researchers and scholars are always coming up with new ideas and. Well, this is really about this. Not that. I mean, it's fascinating, you know, as a historian, to sort of dip my toe in the world of literature. English literature and the Joyce industry, I would say, was a fascinating little foray.
- [60:16]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. And how great is it that the final book that we would be reading in our final moments here ends with that passage that ends with the word yes?
- [60:31]
Holly Baggett
Absolutely. I didn't think about that. Absolutely. Great.
- [60:35]
Jack Wilson
Okay. Well, Holly Baggot, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [60:41]
Holly Baggett
Well, thank you, Jack. I really did enjoy myself.
- [60:50]
Jack Wilson
Okay. And it ends with yes. I'm going to try to build some more yeses into my life. Start the day with a yes and end one with a yes, with yeses up the wazoo. In between, my thanks to Holly Baggett for joining me and to Francesca Wade. Her book is worth reading, folks. Do check it out. And don't forget to tell me about your favorite independent bookstore. We'll figure out where the good work is happening this year and who's doing it, and what makes their efforts worthwhile. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time. Sa. Well, the holidays have come and gone once again, but if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift, well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offer of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now, you call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a try@mintmobile.com Limited time, 50% off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 month or $180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy. See terms.