Adam Thirlwell in London Review of Books:
I love Gertrude Stein but I find it very difficult to think about the way I love her, to be precise about what’s so charming and also valuable in her writing, because everywhere you look there is her image and it can monopolise the attention. Not that I don’t love her image too. The problem is in working out what’s important, the image or the work or the way of living – or even whether these can be or should be separated out at all. Often she is pictured as part of a couple, usually with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, hovering watchfully in the background, or with one of her poodles, but sometimes she is simply herself: a presence in brown corduroy. Or there is the famous portrait by Picasso from 1905, with the face he added in later, not so much a face as a mask, and her joke about it, in Toklas’s voice: ‘After a little while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.’ She made many jokes, in fact: Stein’s are perhaps the only modernist works that make you laugh. I don’t mean laughing at them, which is what most people did with Stein. She became a kind of clown princess, which is unfair, but then almost all the attention directed at Stein has been unfair or misplaced, even from her admirers. It’s as if her brilliance is always quivering and in doubt, something that exists only in an endless process of attack or defence, which can make trying to think about her very tiring.
More here.
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