Gertrude and T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot went to tea at the rue de Fleurus on 15 November 1924. He sat holding his umbrella, asked Gertrude why she so frequently used the split infinitive and said he would print a new piece by her in The Criterion, the London magazine he edited. Gertrude sent him ‘the fifteenth of November’ so he would know it was written uniquely for him and not plucked from the cupboard. It was all about wool is wool and silk is silk or wool is woollen or silk is silken. Eliot published it two years later. The literary editor of the New York Evening Post, Henry Seidel Canby, wrote of it:
If this is literature or anything other than stupidity worse than madness then has all the criticism since the beginning of letters been mere idle theorizing.
publication of The Making of Americans
Lesbians saw Gertrude into print. Mabel Dodge privately published Gertrude’s portrait of her at the Villa Curonia, and Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap included pieces by her in The Little Review. Then in 1925, seventeen years after Gertrude finished writing it and commercial publishers had rejected it, a short run of The Making of Americans was at last published by Contact Editions, which was financed by Bryher, with her husband of convenience Robert McAlmon as editor.
Bryher described her first meeting with Gertrude in her memoir, The Heart to Artemis. She was walking with McAlmon in Paris. Gertrude stopped her car and ‘lumbered down’.
Two penetrating eyes in a square impassive face seemed to be absorbing every detail of my appearance. ‘Why McAlmon’ a puzzled voice remarked, ‘you did not tell me that you had married an ethical Jewess. It’s rather a rare type.’
Bryher was not remotely Jewish, though she was ethical. But, she said, ‘you did not argue with Gertrude Stein. You acquiesced.’
Gertrude signed a contract with Contact. There was to be an initial print run of 500 copies plus five deluxe versions printed on vellum. Gertrude said she would personally shift fifty copies. Darantiere, as ever, was the printer. Carl Van Vechten, who despite great efforts had failed to find an American publisher, was delighted; he viewed Gertrude’s book as ‘big as, perhaps bigger than James Joyce, Marcel Proust or Dorothy Richardson’. He compared it to the Book of Genesis: ‘There is something Biblical about you Gertrude. Certainly there is something Biblical about you.’
Publication was tortuous. Alice accused McAlmon of being irresponsibly drunk throughout the whole process. Gertrude said McAlmon forgot from one letter to the next what he had or had not agreed. She wanted her book ‘to go big and I want to get my royalties’. Spurred by Alice, and without consulting McAlmon, in the middle of production she asked Jane Heap, of The Little Review, to find a different American publisher. Jane Heap approached Benjamin Huebsch, publisher of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. She did not know he had turned down Gertrude’s book thirteen years previously. Then Gertrude told McAlmon that Boni & Liveright were interested in bringing out all her work. She wrote to him on 16 September:
It is for me an important opportunity. Their proposal is to buy The Making of Americans from you that is the 500 copies minus the 40 copies already ordered, for a thousand dollars… They would pay for the unbound sheets and covers upon delivery… Will you wire me your answer within 24 hours. You will realise how much this opportunity means to me.
McAlmon sent his wire, ‘Book bound offer too low and vague.’ He followed up with an irritated letter: it was unbusinesslike for Boni & Liveright not to deal with him, the printing costs had been $3,000, he did not feel like making a gift of his work to any publisher. Nonetheless, Gertrude phoned Darantiere and asked him to send the plates to Boni & Liveright. Darantiere checked with McAlmon, who told him not to take any orders except from Contact. On 8 October McAlmon again wrote to Gertrude:
Had you wished to give arbitrary orders on the book you could have years back had it printed yourself… the book is now complete, stitched, and will be bound. You will get your ten copies which will be sufficient for your friendly gifts and at least more than commercial publishers give authors. Whatever others you want you can have at the usual author’s rate of 50% on the sale price of eight dollars. We will send out review copies to some special reviewers if you choose to send us a list of names and addresses. Further panic and insistence and ‘helping us’ will not delight me.
Three months after publication in December, only 103 copies had been sold. Reviews were thin and poor. Edmund Wilson in The New Republic said he could not read it through:
with sentences so regularly rhythmical, so needlessly prolix, so many times repeated and ending so often with present participles, the reader is all too soon in a state not to follow the slow becoming of life, but simply to fall asleep.
The Irish Statesman said it must be among the seven longest books in the world. The Saturday Review of Literature wrote: ‘Miss Stein has exhibited the most complete befuddlement of the human mind.’ The reviewer expressed concern for the well-being of the compositors and said they deserved sixteen bucks a day for the rest of their natural lives.
Six months later, McAlmon wrote a scornful letter to Gertrude about the book’s lack of sales:
You knew it was a philanthropic exercise as the MS had been some twenty years on your hands. There is no evidence of any order having come through your offices except from your immediate family. If you wish the books retained you may bid for them. Otherwise, by Sept – one
