The book had no chapters and some sentences were twenty lines long. It marked, Gertrude told Alice, the difference between American and English literature. English literature made the nineteenth century, America made the twentieth and she, Gertrude, made twentieth-century American literature. Gertrude explained she was:
escaping from the inevitable narrative of anything of everything succeeding something of needing to be succeeding that is following anything of everything consisting that is the emotional and the actual value of anything counting in anything having beginning and middle and ending.
Alice thought Gertrude’s writing more exciting than anything that had ever been written. She started typing it all up. Her routine was to go to rue de Fleurus early in the mornings and get to work while Gertrude was still in bed. She taught herself to type on a worn-out Blickensderfer typewriter:
The typewriter had a rhythm, made a music of its own… In those complicated sentences I rarely left anything out. And I got up a tremendous speed. Of course my love of Henry James was a good preparation for the long sentences.
She developed what she called a ‘Gertrude Stein technique – like playing Bach’. She was one of the few able to decipher Gertrude’s handwriting – Gertrude could not always do that. It was, Alice said, a very happy time in her life – ‘like living history… I hoped it would go on for ever’.
Gertrude began The Making of Americans in 1903 and finished it in 1908. It started as a chronicle of a family rather like her own, of German-Jewish immigrant stock. Any discernible narrative quickly became subsumed by Gertrude’s musings on the ‘fundamental natures’ of the mother and father and their relationships with their three children and everyone else. She pondered human nature and the relation of all kinds of personality one to the other and lamented her authorial struggle with the task undertaken. She perhaps knew she might scare away readers and was not giving them a racy read:
Bear it in your mind my reader, but truly I never feel it that there ever can be for me any such creature, no it is this scribbled and dirty and lined paper that is really to be to me always my receiver, but anyhow reader, bear it in your mind – will there be for me ever any such creature – what I have said always before to you, that this that I write down a little each day on my scraps of paper for you is not just a conversation to amuse you, but a record of a decent family’s progress respectably lived by us and our fathers and our mothers and our grandfathers and grandmothers and this by me carefully a little each day to be written down here…
Her novel was certainly modern, then and whenever. Reading it required existential surrender and compassion for the author’s struggle:
I mean, I mean and that is not what I mean, I mean that not anyone is saying what they are meaning, I mean that I am feeling something, I mean that I mean something and I mean that not any one is thinking is feeling, is saying, is certain of that thing, I mean that not anyone can be saying, thinking, feeling, not any one can be certain of that thing, I am not ever saying, thinking, feeling, being certain of this thing, I mean, I mean, I know what I mean.
Alice typed away.
fried chicken and apple pie
Gertrude pined for American food so Alice cooked fried chicken and apple pie, roast turkey with stuffing of mushrooms, chestnuts and oysters. Often Alice did not leave the rue de Fleurus until midnight.
In the summer of 1908, Michael Stein rented the Villa Bardi in Florence for the summer months for his wife and son and Gertrude and Leo. Gertrude suggested Alice and Harriet Levy rent the Casa Ricci nearby. She introduced Alice to the Berensons, to Claribel and Etta Cone and to Mabel Dodge Luhan, adventurer, diarist, writer, who lived at the Villa Curonia. On that holiday, Gertrude formally declared her love to Alice and invited her to come and live with her and Leo at 27 rue de Fleurus. Alice wept with happiness. Harriet Levy said she counted thirty sodden handkerchiefs a day. ‘Day after day she wept because of the new love that had come into her life,’ Harriet wrote.
So Alice entrenched as Gertrude’s lover, friend, housekeeper, amanuensis, cook, wife, everything. ‘She is very necessary to me, my Baby…’ Gertrude wrote. They started calling each other Lovey and Pussy. Alice was Pussy.
Leo, agreeable at first to Alice’s arrival at rue de Fleurus, gave up his study so she could have a room of her own and was discreet about leaving the house so she and Gertrude could be alone together. ‘It was very considerate of him,’ Gertrude said. In 1909 he began a relationship of his own with Nina Auzias, a twenty-six-year-old artists’ model. She was involved in affairs with three other men too. Leo was preoccupied with dietary matters, had gone deaf and stopped going to the Saturday salons: ‘I would rather harbour three devils in my insides than talk about art,’ he wrote to Mabel Weeks in February 1913. He genuinely hated Picasso’s cubism and Gertrude’s word portraits, but his greater pain was that Gertrude turned from him, stopped being his disciple, and thought her own worth greater than his. The
