Masterpieces, Manifestoes and the Business of Living: Gertrude Stein Lecturing

Abstract

Gertrude Stein, for whatever psychologically, socially or culturally induced reasons, needed to be famous, to make a conquest of power and tradition, to experience what she referred to as la gloire. However, when large-scale ‘best-seller’ fame finally came to her with the 1933 publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she quickly realised that it was not the sort of gloire she was looking for. She was all too conscious of the fact that she was the most widely known unread author in America. For a writer who felt that she had written one of the three great works of the twentieth century (The Making of Americans joined Ulysses and A la recherche du temps perdu — LIA, p. 184) this was unacceptable. She wanted to be read and to be lionised for her creative genius; she did not want to be lionised only for the force and appeal of her personality. After all, she had been well known for years as the ‘Sybil of Montparnasse’ — as the friend, patron, and promoter of many of the early twentieth century’s most famous artists and writers, and, while this role occupied her, she did not consider it either fulfilling (‘governing is occupying but not interesting’ — law 65) or her life’s work. She was a writer. And it was as a writer that she would have herself lionised.