RHUBARB
Rhubarb is Susan not Susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please.
Gertrude said what excited her was:
that the words that made what she looked at be itself were words that, to her, exactly related themselves to the thing at which she was looking, but as often as not had nothing to do with what any words would do that described that thing.
Her excitement did not help comprehension. Some thought tender buttons were clitorises, others thought they were marinated mushrooms. But while Three Lives and The Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia had been privately printed, Tender Buttons found a publisher, although of an unorthodox sort.
Mabel Dodge again was the instigator. She gave a copy of Gertrude’s portrait of her to her friend Carl Van Vechten – photographer and writer. He wrote more than twenty books – among his novels were The Tattooed Countess and Nigger Heaven, and he promoted all forms of African art. Many of his photographic portraits were of homosexual men and lesbian women: Pierre Balmain, Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, Tallulah Bankhead, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Elsa Maxwell, Virgil Thomson, Gore Vidal.
Mabel Dodge said he was ‘really queer looking’ and ‘when he laughed little shrieks flew out between the slits in his big teeth’. They spoke on the phone each day and he called her Mike. He had a large private income, was married but homosexual and he supported new writers and modern art. Gertrude, Alice and he became firm friends. and formed what they called the Woojums family. He was Papa Woojums. Alice was Mama Woojums, who did all the tedious work. Gertrude was Baby Woojums. Van Vechten championed Gertrude and did all he could to see her work published, publicized and performed. Donald Evans, the publisher he found for Tender Buttons, was an American friend who wrote strange imagist poetry and had started Claire Marie, which promised ‘New Books for Exotic Tastes’:
Claire Marie believes there are in America seven hundred civilized people only. Claire Marie publishes books for civilized people only. Claire Marie’s aim it follows from the premises is not even secondarily commercial.
Mabel Dodge said Donald Evans was pale and thin with dark brooding eyes that seemed dead but saw everything. Claire Marie Press, she told Gertrude, was absolutely third rate. She advised her against publishing with him and said to do so ‘would signal to the world that there was something degenerate, effete and decadent about the whole Cubist movement which they all connect with you’.
But Gertrude went ahead, and in June 1914 a thousand copies of Tender Buttons were printed and bound in canary yellow covers. To promote the book, Evans wrote:
The last shackle is struck from context and collocation, each unit of the sentence stands independent and has no commerce with its fellows. The effect produced on the first reading is something like terror.
Such publicity did little to entice readers. Reviewers voiced confusion. The Chicago Tribune pondered whether the ‘Tender’ of the title was a rowboat, a fuel car attached to a locomotive or a human emotion. The Detroit News wrote that after reading bits of it, ‘a person feels like going out and pulling the Dime Bank building over on to himself’. The New York Post reviewer wondered if Gertrude had been smoking hashish and the Commercial Advertiser wrote:
The new Stein manner is founded on what the Germans call ‘wort salad’, a style particularly cultivated by crazy people… The way to make a wort salad is to sit in a dark room, preferably between the silent and mystic hours of midnight and dawn, and let the moving fingers write whatever comes…
No reviewer claimed to understand Tender Buttons, though all agreed it was a departure from the past and unlike anything else.
In the August edition of Trend, Carl Van Vechten described Gertrude as ‘massive in physique, a Rabelaisian woman with a splendid thoughtful face, mind dominating her matter’. He said words ‘surged through her brain and flowed out of her pen’, and Tender Buttons was irresistible, sensuous, fresh and with majestic rhythm. And Janet Flanner in a ‘Letter from Paris’ wrote: ‘No American writer is taken more seriously than Miss Stein by the Paris modernists.’
So, despite her unpublished, largely unread oeuvre, Gertrude Stein became famous, a woman staunchly married, but to a woman, a writer if not one to be read. And Alice, the shrewd publicist, holding bags and brollies in the shadows, wearing gypsy frocks and with dark Hebraic hair, dangling earrings and proud moustache, was half of the picture of a sight to be remembered.
Tender Buttons did not sell well, Claire Marie Press folded and Donald Evans killed himself. But the literary world, even while it mocked Gertrude Stein, reckoned with her and the questions she asked about life and art.
the First World War
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, but that was the Balkans and distant from lesbians in Paris experimenting with the English language. John Lane, founder in London with Charles Elkin Mathews of The Bodley Head and publisher of Oscar Wilde and the literary periodical The Yellow Book, had told Gertrude his wife had enjoyed Three Lives and if she came to his office in July, a contract to publish would await her.
Gertrude and Alice duly went to London, met with John Lane, secured publication agreement and chose a three-piece suite to replace the chairs Leo had taken with him to Florence.2 On 4 August, Britain declared war on Germany. Travel restrictions meant they could not get visas and permits to return to France. Their intended brief visit lasted eleven weeks. Gertrude’s Baltimore cousins wired them money and John Lane put publication on hold. ‘Do you remember it was the 5th of September we heard of asphyxiating gases?’ Gertrude wrote. ‘Do
