Leo told her he had seen trees strangled by vines in the same way.
Mabel’s villa was a fifteenth-century Medici palace, which she restored to its Renaissance opulence. Surrounded by olive groves, it looked out towards Florence and the Apennine mountains. Her ‘Gran Salone’ (she pronounced it with an American drawl) was 90 feet long with high windows, a fourteenth-century stone fireplace with sun symbols, Florentine paintings, a Chinese terracotta statue of Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy… The salon opened to a loggia with views of a fifteenth-century Carthusian monastery.
‘Please come down here soon,’ Mabel wrote when Gertrude was in Italy with Alice in the summer of 1912, ‘the house is full of pianists, painters, pederasts, prostitutes and peasants.’ Mabel’s unsatisfactory husband, Edwin Dodge, was in America. She said she most associated him with motoring around Italy and looking at churches. ‘Eating alone with Edwin was sad,’ she said. Over time Mabel had four husbands and became known as Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan.
During her stay, Gertrude wrote – between midnight and dawn, in a room next to Mabel’s bedroom – another word portrait: Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. Mabel was having an affair with the twenty-two-year-old tutor of her son, and she described one night in her Intimate Memories, volume 1:
white moonlight – white linen, and the blond white boy I found sweet like fresh hay and honey and milk… my natural desire for him was so strong, like light shaking out of clouds… and so we remained for heaven knows how long while Gertrude wrote on the other side of the wall, sitting in candlelight like a great Sybil, dim against the red and gold damask that hung loosely on the walls.
At dawn, Alice, in a small room next to Gertrude’s, typed up the work of the night. Each day, both she and Gertrude were equally delighted by what Gertrude had written, though Gertrude could not always recall what that was. Her portrait of Mabel Dodge began cheerily enough: ‘The days are wonderful and the nights are wonderful and the life is pleasant’, but quickly became cubist:
Bargaining is something and there is not that success. The interior is what if application has that accident results are appearing. They did not darken. That was not an adulteration. So much breathing has not the same place when the end is lessening. So much breathing has the same place and there might not be so much suggestion. There can be the habit that there is if there is no need of resting.
Mabel called the portrait ‘a masterpiece of success’ and said even if she did not altogether understand it, ‘sometimes I don’t understand things in myself, past or about to come’. She thought that while Gertrude was writing the portrait, through her ‘unconscious lines she seemed to grow warmer to me’.
At lunch, Gertrude, sitting in Edwin Dodge’s chair, sent Mabel
such a strong look over the table that it seemed to cut across the air to me in a band of electrified steel – a smile travelling across on it – powerful – Heavens! I remember it now so keenly!
Alice hurried from the room to the terrace. Gertrude gave ‘a surprised noticing glance after her and when Alice did not return, followed her’. She came back alone and said ‘She doesn’t want to come to lunch. She feels the heat today… From that time on’, Mabel wrote, ‘Alice began to separate Gertrude and me poco poco.’
Alice sent Gertrude’s portraits and manuscripts of The Making of Americans and of Three Lives to publishers. A cupboard at rue de Fleurus filled with their return. Some rejection letters were caustic. Mr Arthur C. Fifield, Publisher, of Clifford’s Inn, London, E.C., wrote:
19 April 1912
Dear Madam
I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one. Hardly one.
Many thanks. I am returning the M.S. by registered post. Only one M.S. by one post.
Sincerely yours.
Mabel Dodge loved her own portrait, personally paid for 300 copies to be printed and bound in Florentine floral wallpaper, and wrote a eulogistic article about Gertrude, which was published in March 1913 in the New York magazine Arts & Decoration:
Gertrude Stein is doing with words what Picasso is doing with paint. She is impelling language to induce new states of consciousness, and in doing so language becomes with her a creative art rather than a mirror of history.
In her impressionistic writing she uses familiar words to create perceptions, conditions and states of being never before quite consciously experienced. She does this by using words that appeal to her as having the meaning that they seem to have.
In Gertrude Stein’s writing every word lives and apart from concept it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that if we read it aloud and receive it as pure sound, it is like a kind of sensuous music.
Just as one may stop for once, in a way, before a canvas of Picasso and letting one’s reason sleep for an instant may exclaim ‘it is a fine pattern’, so, listening to Gertrude Stein’s words and forgetting to understand what they mean, one submits to their gradual charm.
Mabel praised ‘Gertrude’s Revolution’, hypnotic effect and magical evocation and said ‘out of the shattering and petrification of today, up from the cleavage and disintegration, we will see order emerging tomorrow’.
Gertrude was ‘as proud as punch’ with Mabel’s
