Status Updates From Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife

English priest, Father Edward Taylor, to whom Toklas talked at great length before deciding to convert. (Taylor expressed some discomfort taking confession in a room decorated with paintings of naked women; Toklas made some small skirts and bodices from cloth and paper, and attached them to the Picassos before he arrived.)

The French people began, slowly, to recognise the atrocities their government had not only enabled but, in many cases, perpetrated.1 Many were eager to forget the fact that support for Pétain and the Armistice had been so widespread in 1940, and preferred to imagine that with the exception of outright collaborators, France had stood united against the enemy.

Lewis said:Paris literary world was dictated by a ‘Gipsy Queen’ (Stein) and an ‘Irish Exile’ (Joyce) ..Stein herself remained silent on the controversy, but Joyce replied within the pages of Finnegans Wake, which was then being serialised in transition. He denied any connection with ‘that eyebold earbig noseknaving gutthroat’ – clearly identifiable, to readers familiar with the saga, as Gertrude Stein.

She knew that her portrait had led the way to Les Demoiselles; that Picasso’s iconoclastic attack on classical ideals of female beauty had materialised, first, in the stripped-back, androgynous features he had given her, inspired by the Iberian sculptures he had seen at the Louvre in 1906. He showed his appreciation by acknowledging her as an equal. An envelope is addressed to ‘Gertrude Stein, Man of Letters’.

But her texts aren’t so much about that ostensible subject matter: rather, they engage with the way words work together on the page, recasting everyday experiences and perceptions in surreal mutations of language.