He publicly called her a bitch. Criticized by his editor, Maxwell Perkins, for this, Hemingway responded in a letter to him on 7 September 1935:
Gertrude? What would you like me to put in place of bitch? Fat bitch? Lousy bitch? Old Bitch? Lesbian Bitch? What is the modifying adjective that would improve it? I don’t know what word to replace bitch with. Certainly not whore. If anyone was ever a bitch that woman was a bitch. I’ll see if I can change it. … For Christ’s sake Max don’t you see that they have to attack me to believe in themselves…. Would you prefer fat female? That is possible. I’ll change it to fat female or just female. That’s better. That will make her angrier than bitch, will please you by not calling a lady a bitch, will make it seem that I care less about her lying about me, and will please everyone but me who cares only about honesty.
Gertrude, he said, was menopausal and all her former talent had degenerated to ‘malice and self-praise… Homme des lettres, woman of letters, salon woman. What a lousy stinking life.’ He said she and her feathered friends had decided nobody was any good creatively unless they were queer, that she thought all queer people talented and that anyone who was any good must be queer. When he heard her voice on the radio in 1934, he described it as like a distant echo from the tomb of a dead friendship.
In cold revenge, he later retaliated in his own memoir, A Moveable Feast, published posthumously in 1964. In his account of how their friendship ended, he said he called one morning at 27 rue de Fleurus, the maid gave him a glass of Alice’s eau de vie and told him Gertrude would soon be down; he then heard Alice speaking to Gertrude as he had never heard one person speak to another:
never, anywhere, ever. Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying Don’t pussy. Don’t. Don’t Please don’t. I’ll do anything pussy but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t pussy.
Hemingway said he slipped away, unable to listen to more.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas caused sufficient offence for transition to publish a supplement in February 1935 with the title ‘Testimony Against Gertrude Stein’. Among those retaliating were the magazine’s editor, Eugène Jolas, Georges Braque and Henri Matisse. In a foreword, Jolas wrote that Gertrude had no real understanding of what was happening with her contemporaries and was never ideologically intimate with such movements as Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism and that:
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its hollow tinsel bohemianism and egocentric deformations may very well become one day the symbol of the decadence that hovers over contemporary literature.
Braque, in his testimony, said Gertrude never knew French well, entirely misunderstood cubism because she saw it simply in terms of personalities and that he had felt most uncomfortable when he met her and Alice at Avignon during the war and they were wearing boy-scout uniforms and pith helmets.
Matisse was offended by Gertrude’s description of his wife as ‘a very straight dark woman with a long face and a firm large loosely hung mouth like a horse’. His wife, he said, was ‘a very lovely Toulousaine’ with beautiful dark hair.
Leo’s scorn matched Hemingway’s: he called the Autobiography a farrago of clever anecdote, stupid brag and general bosh. ‘God what a liar she is’, he wrote to Mabel Weeks.
If I were not something of a psychopathologist I should be very much mystified. Some of her chronology is too wonderful… Practically everything that she says of our activities before 1911 is false both in fact and implication but one of her radical complexes, of which I believe you knew something, made it necessary practically to eliminate me.
Most readers found Gertrude’s Autobiography light-hearted, humorous and refreshingly easy to read. But she had angered many men. And for herself she was equivocal about the success that followed publication. This popular, easy-to-read style was not how she wanted to be represented:
So many people knowing me I was I no longer and for the first time since I had begun to write I could not write and what was also worse I began to think about how my writing would sound to others…
She wanted to earn a lot of money but did not want to do what she had to do to achieve that. ‘There are some things a girl cannot do,’ she said. She reasoned, quite rightly, it was the work of her true self that had made people interested in her in the first place. But following the success of the Autobiography, Bennett Cerf, founding editor of Random House, gave her contracts for what she regarded as her real work and published her much rejected The Making of Americans and Three Lives, and a collection of her portraits and essays called Portraits and Prayers.
The success of the Autobiography brought money, fame and invitations to lecture in the States. ‘There is no doubt about it there is no pleasure like it, the sudden splendid spending of money and we spent it,’ Gertrude wrote. They bought an eight-cylinder Ford, had running water installed in the country house in Bilignin and a telephone put in there. ‘Now
