GERTRUDE STEIN

A life after death.

British biographer Wade was a fan of Gertrude Stein, “intrigued—and confounded—by her contradictions…her indefatigable self-mythologising, her wry probing of genre and gender. Above all,” she admits, “I was drawn to her work—even if, at first, I didn’t know what to make of it.” Her inspiration for writing about Stein came when she found, at Yale’s Beinecke Library, a trove of notes made by a literary scholar, Leon Katz, newly opened to researchers after Katz’s death in 2017. Drawing on Stein’s unpublished texts, private jottings, and months of interviews with Alice Toklas, Katz documented significant facts about Stein that suggested a more complex image of the self-proclaimed genius and her diffident companion than what was widely known. Wade decided to structure her book in two parts: the first, an overview of “the narrative she crafted carefully”; the second, her afterlife: “the years in which her posthumous legacy was constructed, celebrated and contested, by all with a stake in the evolving legend—chief among them, Alice B. Toklas.” Drawing judiciously on archival material, Stein’s autobiographies, recent scholarship, and biographies of Stein by Brenda Wineapple, Linda Wagner-Martin, and Janet Malcolm, to name a few, Wade creates a lively account. She astutely handles controversial issues, such as Stein’s politics, and she dives bravely into the tangled web of Stein’s afterlife: family discord, frustrated efforts to see all of Stein’s works published, Toklas’ financial troubles, and, of course, her disclosures to Katz, which complicated “the public image of mutual devotion” that Toklas insisted on throughout her widowhood. Nevertheless, while Wade’s revelations contribute to a nuanced portrait of Stein, Toklas, and their relationship, they fall short of elucidating the hermetic, insular writing that continues to confound Stein’s readers.

A probing examination of an enigmatic writer.