My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

Karren Alenier

The prolific, early Modernist writer Gertrude Stein broke so many literary and lifestyle conventions that it can be hard to appreciate the extent and  reach of her creativity both in writing and living. Deborah Levy attempts to illuminate Stein and her work in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction. In the Steiny Road Poet’s opinion, Levy’s “fiction” is a fascinating cross-genre work that combines elements of two or more established genres. In the case of Levy’s book, it combines fiction (novel) and nonfiction (biography and current-day journal).

Levy calls My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein “a fiction” as it is the story of an unnamed British woman, possibly Levy, trying to write an essay about Gertrude Stein while engaging in “current moment” friendships with two women: the French Franny who has several women lovers and the Danish Eva who is working on a graphic novel in Paris while her husband Hamish is in Seattle, Washington, working on a film.

Eva has lost her cat named It. While Franny tries to tame the mystery of the cat’s name by renaming it Bob, the narrator, in a Steinian manner, addresses problem after problem that involves an expression of it. In Chapter 12, Levy introduces a discussion of it with the English idiom that describes weather: “It felt like winter had arrived in Paris.” However, what Levy is after has bigger stakes:

I met Eva for a walk. I thought she might want to talk about Hamish in Seattle on this day of all days, his plans, her plans, what he thought about it all. By ‘it all’ did I mean fascism or authoritarianism or something near it?

Chapter 19 has a rather comic instance of the It problem that starts with Fanny telling the narrator she is concerned about how much futile time is being spent on typing out Stein’s sentences.

She [Franny] thinks Gertrude Stein is depressing me. It’s true that Gertrude transmits some sort of misery to me. The exhaustion of reading her prose. The never getting to the it of it.

The narrator then declares she likes reading books that she doesn’t understand. To this Franny says, “Why not have some sex you don’t understand?” Hmm, is Franny offering the narrator a same-sex experience?

As in a journal, ordinary events of the day are commented on without necessarily advancing the throughline story. for example: Chapter 2  opens:

Meanwhile, bombs are falling through the twenty-first century upon the living and the soon-to-be dead. They all have names and surnames in our own century, in the month of November. We are on our screens all the time, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through the various wars in the twenty-fourth year of the twenty-first century.

The short novel of 227 pages is also a stream of consciousness biography of the hard-to-understand Gertrude Stein framed in a ping-pong context of her own writings and that of other writers, such as Sigmond Freud,  Gaston Bachelard, Jacques Derrida, Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and so on. Characteristic of experimental works that include cross-genre pieces, Levy attributes quotations with on-the-spot mention of the publication title, but no further details and never a footnote or end notes.

Another interesting aspect of Levy’s hard-to-pigeon-hole book is its feminist features that play off the expectation of heterosexual relationships. In Chapter 15, Levy provides her take on the role Alice Toklas played in Stein’s life as her “angel at the gate,” the guardian who fended off people who would interfere with either Stein’s work, the relationship between Gertrude and Alice, or Stein’s identification as a male. The latter interference involved Alice corralling the wives and girlfriends of the male writers who came to see Stein. Levy comments: “I am not sure the wives of the male writers fared so well as Alice B.” Then Levy drives home this comment about women suffering discrimination with: “Zelda Fitzgerald and Vivien Eliot both died in mental asylums.”

The feature of Levy’s book most engaging to this reader is her use of film-like jump cuts. For example, in Chapter 3, Levy describes Stein stylishly dressed “wearing a blouse with large puffed sleeves and a bell-shaped skirt stiffened at the hem with a lining of horsehair” and peering into a microscope at Johns Hopkins. This image, in the same paragraph, then jumps to “She will eventually stare at modern art instead and try to work out how it is put together. She had no idea how to put herself together.” Thus, Levy jumps from the portrait of a well-dressed Stein studying at a prominent establishment of learning to Stein the discerning collector of modern art to Stein, a woman who broke all the fashion rules of her time. Later Levy will talk about Stein eliminating the corset that girded her fat into curves and how Stein had her partner Alice Toklas cut her hair short to attain a more mannish look. These jump cuts possibly suggest a film treatment, yet another type of genre.

Some readers will assume that Levy is providing well researched (and therefore correct) information about Gertrude Stein. While this is the case some of the time, Steiny noted several inaccuracies. Levy states in Chapter 4 that Stein died of stomach cancer. Few Stein scholars have bothered to look up her death certificate which clearly states Stein’s cause of death in 1946 was “carcinoma of uterus.” Most likely Stein’s mother also died of uterine cancer, a condition which, at the time of Amelia Stein’s death in 1888, was unnamed and labeled as a female disorder.

In Chapter 13, Levy discusses Stein’s study of bottom character, a phrase Stein never used. Bottom nature was the term Stein coined and used prolifically starting in 1898 in her Harvard Psychology Experiment Report and into a string of her creative works: Q.E.D. (1903); Three Lives, “Melanctha” (1905-1906) and The Making of Americans (1911-1925). Stein believed each person had an underlying pattern of behavior that was a changing mix of repetition, language, human interactions, and timing. Even as these elements changed, the individual remained the same person. Levy asserts interestingly that Picasso got stuck in painting Stein’s portrait because “he had reached for her ‘bottom character’ and discovered it was masked.” The odd thing is that, in chapter 31 of My Year in Paris, Levy quotes “The Gradual Making of The Making of Americans” in Stein’s Lectures in America which uses the phrase bottom nature.

I then began again to think about the bottom nature in people, I began to get enormously interested in hearing how everybody said the same thing over and over again with infinite variations but over and over again until finally  if you listened with great intensity you could hear it rise and fall and tell all there was inside them, not so much by the actual words they said or the thoughts they had but the movement of their thoughts and words endlessly the same and endlessly different.

There is no mistaking that Levy meant bottom nature in Chapter 13 and cannot justify changing the term.

Also in Chapter 31, Levy is content to make a remark about “Alice B.’s recipe for hashish fudge.” By now, most Stein aficionados know that the recipe came from the Moroccan -based friend Brion Gysin. They also know that Alice’s cookbook was late to her publisher and she therefore did not take the time to test the recipe and discover, oh! cannabis, an illegal substance!

Levy also mistakenly asserts in Chapter 31 that Stein delivered medical supplies in both World War I and World War II. Yes, she drove medical supplies in WWI but no, she did not drive medical supplies in the second world war. As a lesbian and a Jew, she was in much more danger in WWII and in 1939 when that war started, Stein was already 65 years old.

The final words of My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein prove to be circular in the tradition of Gertrude Stein’s writing. They are said by Eva who has finished her graphic novel and plans to move to Seattle to live with her husband. Since the narrator has been unable to complete her essay on Stein, Eva says she will write the essay for the narrator and call it My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein; she suggests it could also be called The Making of an American. Her concluding remark is, “Gertrude Stein was a big presence, but I don’t think anyone can ever get to the bottom of it.”