Fabulous potency: Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote, authorial personae, and homosexual identity from the Wilde trials to Stonewall

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Content FABULOUS POTENCY: GETRUDE STEIN, TRUMAN CAPOTE, AUTHORIAL PERSONAE, AND HOMOSEXUAL IDENTITY FROM THE WILDE TRIALS TO STONEWALL by Jeffrey Michael Solomon A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) December 2008 Copyright 2008 Jeffrey Michael Solomon ii Dedication To Greg Bills iii Acknowledgements I am grateful to those who helped me write this dissertation. Professor Susan McCabe, the chair of my dissertation committee, read an endless slew of chapters and drafts. I could not have asked for a more open-handed mentor and chair. Susan always held my work up to the highest standard and motivated me to write more clearly, more incisively, and more comprehensively: to write, in any number of ways, more. Her sensibility and critical acumen guided this project from a variety of unfortunate shallows and shoals. And Susan was as friendly and fun as she was gracious and brilliant. Who could ask for more in a chair? More precisely, who could ask for more more persuasively than Susan? Professors Joseph Boone, Alice Gambrell, and Tania Modleski were three of the first professors I met at USC, and I cannot overstate their influence upon me and my work, their generosity, or their personal charm. Their classes not only expanded my sense of what was academically possible but also offered me models of the best possible pedagogy. Though I met my outside member, Professor Anne Friedberg, later in my career at USC, she shared with the rest of my committee the authorship of books that I have read and re-read. When I consider that such scholars have taken such pains to guide me, I am amazed—and when I consider the time and care that all five committee members have offered me, I am tremendously moved. Other professors have also been generous, and I particularly want to thank Professors Leo Braudy and John Carlos Rowe, both of whom read chapters to my great advantage. iv The English department and the University of Southern California supported this project with a Provost’s fellowship, an English Department Dissertation Fellowship, and a Final Summer Fellowship. The Huntington Library and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation also provided wherewithal in the form of a Christopher Isherwood fellowship. I am grateful to have been entrusted with these resources of time and money, and I hope that I have used them well. Sizeable excerpts of Chapters One and Two have been published as articles, and I am beholden to my editors—Ken Corbett at Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Lee Zimmerman at Twentieth-Century Literature—as well as to the journals’ editorial readers for their suggestions for revision. Between them, the editors and readers both validated my project and substantively improved it. The dissertation has benefited immensely. I have also been blessed with my fellow students at USC, several of whom have been invaluable to Fabulous Potency and have become great friends. The help of James Penner was essential to several chapters, and I am thankful for his knowledge and advice. Marci McMahon did a great deal to make my prose style and organization clearer, and I am obliged to her patience and care. Marci and the other members of my dissertation group offered invaluable fellowship while climbing this mountain. I want in particular to mention Ruth Blandón and Tom O’Leary, two of my closest friends, whose support extended past the dissertation to other registers of my life, and whose friendship means a great deal to me. I am fortunate to have worked with Tom, Ruth, Marci, and James. I also want to mention Erika Wright, my first friend in the graduate department, who helped me find a home at USC. Outside of school, I am grateful to Doug Sadownick and v Steve Walther for their spiritual and physical guidance, without which I would have had a much more difficult time finishing this project. It is a convention to end such acknowledgements domestically, and I must concur. I am grateful to my aunt, Helen Solomon, for many years of offering her sympathetic ear, her keen understanding and her dry advice. Not to mention her endless fund of personal glamour! And I take great pleasure in thanking Greg Bills, my domestic partner of more than fifteen years. Greg has read more versions of this dissertation than I—or he—can count, and I am so grateful for his critical acumen, his emotional support, his beauty, and his love. vi Table of Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgments iii List of Figures viii Abstract xi Introduction: Title and Terminology 1 High Score!: Capote, Stein, and the Kinsey 6 3 Values and Principles 12 Chapter Outlines 21 Conclusion 29 Endnotes for Introduction 30 Chapter 1: Young, Effeminate, and Strange: Photographic Portraits of Young Truman Capote 33 At First Sight 33 The Pubic Persona of Truman Capote 34 Capote in LIFE 37 Effeminate, Childish, and Strange: Definitions 43 Capote and Newton Arvin: A Secret Display 47 Capote in LIFE, Again 50 Agency and Subversion 54 Other Voices in Contemporary Mass Media 60 The Author Photo of Other Voices, Other Rooms 64 Broadly Queer, Specifically Gay 69 Capote as Seen by Gay Contemporaries 71 Capote in TIME 73 Conclusion: “The Winnah!” 75 Endnotes for Chapter 1 77 Chapter 2: Capote, Forster, and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture at Mid-Century 81 Strangers on a Train 81 “We Had A Very Pleasant Time”: The Fracas in Context 92 The Limits of the Liberal Imagination: Forster and Lionel Trilling 96 A Dainty Blow: Capote and Hardwick 103 Girls’ School: The Gendering of Literary Publication at Mid-Century 106 A Double Response: Capote and Diana Trilling 111 Endnotes for Chapter 2 119 vii Chapter 3: The Apparitional Lesbian Endureth, or Why Has Three Lives Not Been Directly Read in Lesbian Terms? 124 The Apparitional Gertrude Stein 124 Three Lives Today 128 Three Lives’ Initial Publication in Literary and Material Context 132 Initial Responses to Three Lives 136 Three Lesbian Registers 143 Three Lives in Terms of Modernism and in Terms of Race 146 Endnotes for Chapter 3 159 Chapter 4: Three Lesbian Lives: A Map of Same-Sex Passion 164 Ghost Map 164 Three Lives in a Lesbian Context: Gertrude Stein Comes of Age 168 “The Good Anna” and the Hard Bargain 174 “Melanctha” and the Harder Bargain 199 Proto-Lesbian Trauma: Dead Babies and the Perils of Wandering 220 No Bargain at All: “The Gentle Lena” and the Limits of Lesbian Discourse 244 Homosexual Herman and Death by Marriage 256 Three Lesbian Lives 264 Endnotes for Chapter 4 267 Chapter 5: Gertrude Stein, 1909-1933: From Broadly Queer to Specifically Lesbian 275 An Impossible Success 275 “A Zolaesque American”: Stein’s First Celebrity Profile 282 Stein and the Armory Show 301 “La Grand Fête Americaine”: Stein on the National Stage 312 Tender Buttons and the Modernist Crown 325 Stein and Her Work as Objets d’Art 327 Stein in Life and Vanity Fair, 1917-1919 335 Gertrude Stein, Opium Queen 363 Stein in and on TIME 383 An Unholy Union: Conclusion to the Dissertation 408 Endnotes for Chapter 5 414 Bibliography 429 viii List of Figures Figure 1: Truman Capote and Marguerite Young. Photo by Lisa Larsen. LIFE 15 July 1946:110. 39 Figure 2: Capote in Tower Room. Photo by Lisa Larsen. LIFE 15 July 1946: 112. 43 Figure 3: Lay-out of LIFE 15 July 1946: 112-113. Photos by Lisa Larsen. 48 Figure 4: Capote at Tête-à-tête. Photo by Jerry Cooke. LIFE 2 June 1947: 75. 51 Figure 5: Jean Stafford. Photo by Jean Speis er. LIFE 2 June 1947: 76. 52 Figure 6: Calder Willingham. Photo by Jerry Cooke. LIFE 2 June 1947: 76. 52 Figure 7: Author’s photo for Other Voices, Other Rooms. By Howard Halma. 65 Figure 8: Olympia. By Edouard Manet. 1863. 66 Figure 9: Max Shulman. Photo by Mina Turner. TIME 3 May 1948: 86. 74 Figure 10: “J’Accuse”: L’Aurore, 13 January 1898. 283 Figure 11: Nude Descending a Staircase, #2, Marcel Duchamp, 1912. 303 Figure 12: “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway).” Cartoon, The Evening Sun, March 20, 1913. 303 Figure 13: U. S. commemorative stamp of Armory Show patrons observing Nude Descending, 1998. 304 Figure 14: Woman upon a Staircase. By Auguste Renoir, 1876. 304 Figure 15: Layout of Arts & Decoration (March 1913): 172. Sculpture Mademoiselle Pogany by Constantin Brancusi. 310 Figure 16: Cover of Saturday Evening Post, 3 September 1916. Drawing by Norman Rockwell. 313 ix Figure 17: “Mimi was a very lively and adorable Comanche.” Drawing by May Wilson Preston. Saturday Evening Post 22 March 1913: 10. 316 Figure 18: Sheet music for “Everybody’s Doing It Now,” 1911. 318 Figure 19: Cover of Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia, 1912. 328 Figure 20: Cover of Tender Buttons, 1914. 329 Figure 21: Cover Detail, Tender Buttons, 1914. 329 Figure 22: Gibson Girl. Drawing by Richard Henry Dana. 339 Figure 23: Gertrude Stein as a graduate student. 339 Figure 24: Lay-out of Life 27 December 1917: 1076-77. 344 Figure 25: “Package.” Cartoon, Life 27 December 1917: 1076. 344 Figure 26: The Willowby’s Ward: “Molly and Mrs. Willowby Return in Time to Rescue the Professor from a Wily Book Agent.” Life 27 December 1917: 1077. 345 Figure 27: Frontispiece of Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays, 1910. 348 Figure 28: Official deportation photo of the “Russian Jewish Anarchist,” 1919. 348 Figure 29: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Cover of Life, 18 September 1919. 354 Figure 30: Courage, Mes Braves! J’arrive! By Lucien Jonas. Vanity Fair 13 June 1918: 31. 360 Figure 31: Portrait of Gertrude Stein. Painting by Pablo Picasso, 1906. 385 Figure 32: Gertrude Stein and Picasso’s Portrait. Photo by Man Ray, 1922. 386 Figure 33: Gertrude Stein. Sculpture by Jo Davidson, 1922. 387 Figure 34: Gertrude Stein. Photograph by George Platt Lynes, 1931. 388 x Figure 35: Marlene Dietrich. Publicity still from Morocco, 1930. 390 Figure 36: Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper. Publicity still for Morocco, 1930. 391 Figure 37: Gertrude Stein by George Platt Lynes. Cover of TIME 11 September 1933. 394 Figure 38: Amy Lowell, cover of TIME 1925. 401 Figure 39: Willa Cather, photo for cover of TIME 1931. 401 Figure 40: Gertrude Stein, cover of TIME 1933. 401 Figure 41: Kathleen Norris, cover of TIME 1935. 401 Figure 42: Virginia Woolf, cover of TIME 1937. 402 Figure 43: Rebecca West, cover of TIME 1945. 402 Figure 44: Jean Kerr, cover of TIME 1961. 402 Figure 45: Phyllis McGinley, cover of TIME 1965. 402 xi Abstract How did Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a testament to a lesbian domestic partnership, become an enormous success in 1933, a year that saw that height of the Great Depression, the rise of the Nazis in Europe, and the consolidation of the restriction of personal freedom that followed the 1920s? Why did Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms (1947) bring its author celebrity and success when homophobia derailed the career of Gore Vidal after he published The City and the Pillar, though both works were published within six months, and though Capote’s novel had as much homosexual content as Vidal’s? I argue that Stein and Capote’s success resulted from the “fabulous potency,” as I call it, that allowed their personae to broadcast both a non-sexual queerness that riveted a mass audience and specific signals of homosexuality that were decoded by those alerted by their own sexual dissidence. I differentiate the authors by gender as I consider how the invisibility of female homosexuality and the hypervisibility of male homosexuality affected their works and careers. Using archival research, I scrutinize how the apparatus and machinery of publishing, advertising, celebrity gossip, and literary reception, cachet, and canon-formation created their authorial personae. I argue that discussion of these authors’ writing was deflected into discussion of their personae throughout the twentieth century. Though Stein and Capote are gay icons, their work is seldom directly read in terms of their sexuality. For instance, despite the overt depiction of lesbian love and sex in Stein’s Three Lives (1909), the text—astonishingly—has never been read as predominantly lesbian; critics have preferred to consider the encoding of female same- xii sexuality rather than its direct depiction. I survey ninety-nine years of Stein criticism and fifty years of writing on Capote as I detail the disciplinary restraints that caused this neglect in literary criticism as a whole, and gay studies and queer theory in particular. Reading Stein and Capote for the direct discussion of homosexuality reconfigures both authors’ place in modernism and reveals them as continuing the naturalist project of depicting “inappropriate” literary subjects for social critique. Introduction Title and Terminology This dissertation is called Fabulous Potency: “fabulous” after “fable,” as “extraordinary, verging on the mythical,” which has subsided colloquially to “amazingly good and wonderful.” “Fabulous” is also intended to signify in the slangy, slightly tired, and difficult to substantiate register within which the word’s constant use is associated with enthusiasm, frivolity, irony, and less happily, the vacuous and the obnoxious—and through these qualities, to homosexuals and certain kinds of women, notably teen girls, socialites, and “show people.” Such connotations stem from the exaggerated stance needed to find enough fabulousness to use the word often—a stance that requires an ability to find wonder and drama in the mundane, even if such wonder and drama can only be attained through the rigorous application of exaggeration and irony. All this drama, exaggeration, and irony are stereotypical aspects of girlishness, and therefore of “girly” aspects of homosexuality. Such girlishness remains attached to gay men more than 100 years after the codification of the gender inversion model of homosexuality, and to an extent predated and postdated that model. Though the frontiers of slang are inherently misty, I believe that “fabulous” is therefore more associated with gay men than gay women. This gives me some pause, as this dissertation considers both male and female homosexuals in both theory and practice. Further, in terms of length, lesbians have a substantive advantage over men in this dissertation, with three chapters to two, and almost twice the page count. 2 “Potency” gives me even more pause, as potency, from the Latin potent-, correlates “having great power and influence” with the “ability to achieve an erection and thereby an orgasm.” The word is a concise yet comprehensive description of male hegemony. Both Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein succeeded within male hegemony (though not easily, and not without tremendous cost) while defying much of that hegemony in their lives, personae, and art. Crudely speaking, they did achieve cultural power through fantastic erections and orgasms, though the configuration of their phantasmic “penises” were unusual, to say the least, and put the form of the phallus as it is usually understood under stress. Though the term “fabulous potency” risks re- inscribing a male model, my aim is both to represent Stein and Capote’s power within a male-dominated society and, like the authors themselves, to queer that potency. I mean to describe an extraordinary and wonderful power that is almost beyond belief; that is associated with femininity, homosexuality, irony; and that, like the word “fabulous” itself in contemporary culture, now seems exhausted to certain populations. This suits the strange power of Gertrude Stein and Truman Capote, as detailed in the following pages. I believe that both would approve. After current common (but not universal) usage, this dissertation equates gay with homosexual, irrespective of gender. While lesbian always references female homosexuality, gay references both, except when specified. The disadvantage of this schema is the risk that male homosexuality may be assumed for gay; the advantage is that it highlights the commonality of gay women and men. I believe in this commonality not only in the “ethnic” model of homosexuality, which holds that gays constitute a people 3 with a distinct culture, but also in the belief that homosexual object choice, in a culture that heavily promotes heterosexuality, leads to psychological and correspondence between gay men and women. This dissertation does not, however, equate gay and queer. I reserve gay for homosexuality and use queer in the broader sense of abnormal, baffling, contrary, incongruous, peculiar, strange, unusual, unexpected, unfamiliar, and weird. High Score!: Capote, Stein, and the Kinsey 6 There is not much question that Truman Capote and Gertrude Stein were gay. On the Kinsey Scale that measures experience, both were 6s, or exclusively homosexual, for the duration of their adult lives. 1 Both had extensively documented homosexual relationships, and there is no evidence that either author had any significant heterosexual interest or experience. 2 Nor did either author pretend otherwise. Fabulous Potency asserts that homosexuality was both apparent and integral not only to these writers’ personal lives but also to the public personae that won these writers celebrity, and, most importantly, to these writers’ art. Stein and Capote thus became homosexual icons, both during their lifetimes and after their death, to a sexual minority in need of such models. Surprisingly, for both authors, homosexuality was essential to the breadth and depth of their celebrity. At the same time that other authors either worked to disguise their homosexuality, passively let the presumption of heterosexuality cloak their public persona, or found their success forestalled, Capote and Stein achieved their great fame in large part because of their homosexuality. Unsurprisingly, homophobia, 4 censorship, and an inability to recognize homosexuality stifled public discussion of their homosexuality—especially as it related to their texts—during Stein’s lifetime, and during the first two decades of Capote’s career. Surprisingly, the din of public comment upon Stein and Capote’s sexuality that eventually ensued did not extend to literary criticism. Despite the Women’s and Gay Rights Movements; the disciplines of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Gender Studies, and Queer Studies; the increasing acceptance and representation of homosexuals in popular culture; and common sense, the work of Stein and Capote is still not usually read in terms of their sexuality While writing this dissertation, I was consistently surprised to see that basic questions of how these authors’ homosexuality shaped their writing and public persona had not yet been asked. For instance, I remain astonished, if no longer bewildered, that homosexuality in Stein’s Three Lives (1909)—not as it is “encoded” in race, but as it is directly presented in the text—has not yet been considered, despite the impressive, and impressively copious, scholarship on Stein in general, and Three Lives in particular. Similarly, I remain dismayed, if no longer puzzled, that the great majority of commentary on Capote concerns In Cold Blood (1966), his only major work that is not overtly concerned with homosexuality. Such silence was once vital to the success of Stein and Capote’s careers, allowing them to be published in the mass market and to achieve success and fame. This achievement in turn allowed their personae and writing to reach a broad audience, and the sexual minority within that broad audience. Critical collaboration with such silence was often protective and progressive as it allowed these authors and their texts to enter the public arena. 5 Forty years after Stonewall, however, during a time when homosexuals have won appreciable legal rights, when the public discussion of homosexuality does not automatically trigger censorship or extreme homophobia, and when sexuality in all its forms is a preoccupation of literary criticism, such silence is no longer progressive. Critical silence upon Stein and Capote’s homosexuality is a tacit agreement that the only “valid” sexuality—the only one that can be integral to art, and thus worth literary and cultural analysis—is heterosexuality, which is almost always assumed when no sexuality is specified. Queer theory was instituted and developed in part to question this validity, and queer theorists’ refutation of gender essentialism and insistence on the social construction of sexual acts and identities has served to deconstruct and destabilize the automatic assumption of heterosexuality. In its place, queer theory propounds a malleable sexual fluidity that underlies human consciousness and identity, and permeates human production. Unfortunately, queer theory’s mandate to destroy the assumption of heterosexual pervasiveness and propound in its stead an unspecified queerness may itself become a universal, and lead to the same neglect of homosexual particulars that an assumed heterosexuality does. 3 Queer theory may also act as a shield for critics’ unconscious homophobia, as it allows them to avoid considering lived homosexual experience, or the specific oppression of homosexuals, in exchange for the flat, unwavering light of an unspecified queerness that is shared by all. In this sense, queer theory can be used to make everyone “straight.” I will show that the critical record of queer theorists considering Capote as a gay man, and Stein as a lesbian, is poor, despite these authors’ status as gay and lesbian icons, and their importance to the history of 6 twentieth-century authorial queerness. Fabulous Potency is an axiological intervention against this tacit agreement that homosexuality is not relevant to literary criticism, which if not homophobic, is certainly homo-ignorant and homo-dismissive. A quick acknowledgement that particular authors are gay or otherwise queer is important, but it is not enough. The relevance of homosexuality and other forms of sexual queerness to an author’s work must also be established and substantiated. Otherwise, the heterosexual bias that underlies most interpretive strategies is put into play, to the detriment of critical reading. Nor is it enough to trace the historical particulars of homosexuality and other forms of sexual queerness. While the construction of homosexuality in terms of psychopathology and abjection has been established, understood, and reinforced with rebar until it can withstand a substantial earthquake, the construction of homosexuality in axiological terms—in terms that examine its value—has not received like inspection in either literary or gay and lesbian studies. In this dissertation, I examine how homosexuality was expressed and homophobia negotiated by Stein and Capote, both in their public persona and in their writing. I study the value of homosexuality in the work of Stein and Capote, and through that study, assert that value. I consider how Stein and Capote exerted their agency in the expression of homosexuality in their personal lives, their public persona, and their art as I keep in mind the limits of this agency, and whether this agency was conscious. Fabulous Potency situates their cultural production not only in theoretical terms but also in practice. I ask not only how Stein, Capote, their personae, and their art were configured 7 by pre-existing cultural understandings of sexuality, but also how Stein and Capote contributed to that construction through their cultural production, and how readers constructed sexuality in Stein and Capote’s personae and work. This allows me to examine how Capote and Stein assisted at least two generations to organize, solidify, and understand their sexuality. This process of solidification was conducted in two steps. First, Capote and Stein’s public personae offered important models of homosexual realization, visibility and success; signaled the homosexual content of their work; and offered a rubric with which to read and understand this work. Stein in particular helped constitute twentieth- century constructions of lesbian identity, as there were so few examples of lesbianism in the public eye. For both authors, their personae served as a dust jacket for their corpus. Second, Capote and Stein’s writing offered a vision of homosexuality as a fixed orientation that became perverse only when internal and external homophobia etiolated and desiccated development, and prevented a coherent, organized self. Capote and Stein offered a sympathetic, sophisticated view of homosexual experience and the tolls taken by a homophobic society. They did not offer sentimental answers or unrealistic happy endings, but rather the possibility for a deeper understanding of the social and psychological cost of homophobia, and an unsentimental acknowledgement of and sympathy for this high price. That’s the theory. In practice, with both Capote and Stein, I attempt to answer two sets of questions in the service of a third. First, I ask how homosexuality plays out in terms of both authors’ personae as I substantiate what aspects of the authors were 8 available to the broad public. To do this, I historically situate the material artifacts that anchor these personae in mass culture: the apparatus and machinery of publishing, marketing (especially photography), and celebrity. I also consider how these public attributes were neither necessarily accurate nor entirely, if at all, under the authors’ control. Second, I ask how homosexuality affected these authors’ receptions in literary and elite culture, including academia. I consider the specifics of how these authors were published and how they gained an audience, both as literary celebrities and as producers of particular books, and substantiate the impact of literary cachet and canon formation upon their literary reputations. This requires an analysis of where both authors were placed within the literary tradition and canon of the twentieth-century United States, insofar as this placement affected the reception of Stein and Capote’s work. For instance, in Chapters 3 and 4, I examine how Stein, broadly speaking, is now understood as a modernist but was not during the early decades of her career, when she was read as a decadent and therefore associated with the fin de siècle. I investigate how these categories interact with the homosexuality of Stein’s persona and art, and how her work can productively be read via a naturalist rather than a modernist or decadent rubric. As I demonstrate how Stein and Capote established a reputation and gained an audience, I ask what a homosexual and proto-homosexual audience found when Stein and Capote’s reputation and celebrity led them to Stein and Capote’s work. Were these authorial personae and books useful to this audience in terms of understanding and configuring homosexuality, and if so, how? As I wrote this dissertation, I attempted to keep in mind at all times the question of how Stein and Capote might affect, say, a 9 fourteen-year-old proto-lesbian in a homophobic community where little information about homosexuality was available, and where what information that was available was bad, both in terms of content and affect. To answer this question, I read Stein and Capote’s texts with an eye to their narration and dramatization of homosexuality. Initially I intended to consider a broader roster of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and otherwise queer authors of the twentieth-century United States, and this dissertation does touch on several, including Djuna Barnes, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Carson McCullers, Gore Vidal, and Tennessee Williams. Overall, however, the scope of my three fundamental questions required me first to limit the authors I studied to Stein and Capote, and second to concentrate my focus upon the start of their careers as celebrities: Capote up to and including the publication of his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1947), and Stein up to the publication of the memoir that finally brought her great fame: The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933). 4 I chose Stein and Capote as they were (1) definitively homosexual in their personal lives; (2) mass-market celebrities, whose homosexuality was integral to their public personae, and who profited from this integrity; and (3) canonical authors whose writing is permeated with homosexual acts, desires, and love. Though there were certainly other lesbian authors in the twentieth-century United States, I argue that Stein is non-pareil in having all three attributes. Capote, too, is unusual in the centrality of his homosexuality to his celebrity and work. I will show, for instance, that though Tennessee Williams was fairly openly gay, and though this was known in literary circles, he did not make homosexuality a major overt concern of his 10 widely published work until the 1970s, and his public persona was not nearly as apparently gay as Capote’s. Having Stein and Capote as the primary figures of Fabulous Potency allows me to consider both a man and a woman, and therefore the very different receptions of male and female homosexuality in the years between the Wilde Trials of 1895 and the Stonewall Riots of 1969. These boundaries mark a somewhat coherent period of homophobia and homosexual censorship in mass culture, and reactions to Stein and Capote permit me to scrutinize this period in some depth. Though Capote was born after Stein, and though his career was largely situated after hers, I discuss him first. Stein takes so much longer than Capote to achieve celebrity that her struggle and achievement can be best seen in the light of Capote’s quicker fame. Putting Capote first runs the risk of foregrounding male homosexuality over female, and thus echoing the gendered division of the twentieth- century United States, when male homosexuality was much more present in mass culture than female. Due to this same division, the consideration of Stein’s career requires a more complex analysis than Capote’s, and considerably more pages to hold it. In my view, such dominance suits the second position. As writers who became known during the first half of the twentieth century, Stein and Capote are both modernist figures, and Fabulous Potency is one of many interdisciplinary considerations of cultural production in modernism concerned with the publishing and marketing of literature. There are two factors that differentiate this study, however. First, the focus on homosexuality as a value, rather than as a pathology or “category,” is unusual. The attempt to follow in detail the path from gay author to gay 11 text, and then through the mechanism of cultural production to gay reader, is even more so. Second, the authors are either not conventionally considered in terms of modernism or are considered here in unconventional ways. Capote is not often spoken of in modernist terms, and is not considered fundamental in any way to the modernist movement—in part because he appears at the tail end of the movement, and in part because his reputation as a celebrity qua celebrity prevents his serious consideration as an intellectual and promotes his consideration as a frivolous artist who therefore is not to be taken seriously. In addition, Capote’s persona promotes his consideration as a celebrity famous for his persona, rather than for his writing. Stein, by contrast, is fundamental to modernist study. Analysis of Stein as the mother of avant-garde poetry, however, fails to see her sexuality in a real and dynamic way beyond talk about how she is “fluid” and “beyond gender.” This, in my view, is insufficient. For both Stein and Capote, the discussion of homosexuality leads me back to an extension of the realist and naturalist project to depict characters and subjects that had not heretofore been considered appropriate literary subjects, and therefore act as agents of social criticism and as incitements for change. While this extension of realism and naturalism into modernism has been much investigated in terms of race, class, gender, and other categories and subjects, it has not been the subject of much attention in terms of homosexuality. I trace this extension throughout this dissertation. 12 Values and Principles Fabulous Potency stipulates five primary values and principles: (1) that homosexuality exists not only as a behavior but also as a phenomenon that may be intrinsic to the self, and therefore not only a stripe of sexual identity but also necessary to the organization of some subjects; (2) that there is such a thing as a social hegemony which affects human behavior, perception, and valuation, including self-perception and self-valuation; (3) that there is a difference between what I call the “broadly queer” and the “specifically gay”; (4) that there is such a thing as a “homosexual reading” of a text, and that such a reading must fall within distinct parameters; and (5) that written texts can help individuals organize, understand, and experience their sexuality. Though all five stipulations are discussed within the dissertation, I want to write a few words about them here, as well as about some relevant terms. My claim that homosexuality is intrinsic raises a red flag in a postmodern, post- structuralist environment that not only denies fixity but also frequently views it as pernicious. This claim also runs athwart aspects of queer theory, social constructionism, and post-structuralism that may be interpreted to mean that not only all sexual behavior but also other aspects of the self and of identity are contingent on society. Furthermore, this claim coexists uncomfortably with queer theory’s thesis that categories of gender and sexuality such as “male,” “female,” “straight,” and “gay” are inherently unstable, differential, and noncategorical. Queer theory in this respect is akin to quantum physics, which increases human comprehension of the universe but which has little impact on that universe as humans experience it, which is ruled by the Newtonian physics that determine 13 the movement of particles from the size of a large molecule on up. Quantum physics proves that the chair I sit on exists only as a probability of energy states, and that it’s entirely possible that it will suddenly dematerialize, leaving me on the floor. This, however, has little application to my experience of sitting. Similarly, the insights of queer theory, while invaluable in terms of the deconstruction and defamiliarization necessary to see and analyze the “normal,” are not always useful in terms of understanding homosexuality from the perspective at which it is lived and experienced. Like all schools of thought, queer theory tends to showcase the figures who best suit its theses and to neglect others. It has brought into focus literary figures who repressed or occluded homosexuality in their life and art, such as T.S. Eliot and Henry James, or whose life and art does indeed indicate a queer, indefinable sexuality, such as Marianne Moore. But it tends to suppress the study of Kinsey 6s such as Capote and Stein, who do not in fact seem to have had a fluid sexuality, except at the molecular level. While I do not doubt that their sexuality—like everyone’s—was in certain respects fluid and contingent, an emphasis on their fluidity leads to misreadings of their work, and the neglect of fundamental aspects of it. In this way, queer theory may unfortunately find itself in conjunction with the historical difficulty that homosexuals have had in proving to themselves and to others that they exist, and that they are not somehow mistaken in this apprehension. I therefore use such terms as “fixed” and “fundamental” knowing that, in some respects, these terms are inaccurate, and that as Gayatri Spivak has shown, essentialism can be strategic. 5 I am indebted to books such as Christopher Nealon’s Foundlings, Henry Abelove’s Deep Gossip, and especially Terry Castle’s The 14 Apparitional Lesbian for theorizing that the forms of homosexuality may differ due to historical circumstances but the fact of homosexuality does not. 6 I also rely heavily on Castle’s concept of the “apparitional lesbian” to explain the mechanism through which homosexuality, especially female homosexuality, may go unseen and unremarked upon despite varieties of evidence. A related concern of this dissertation is how internal and external homophobia in the form of theoretical formulae and disciplinary constraints may combine with the history of apparitional homosexuality to subtract homosexuality from literary criticism. Historical particulars determine whether such subtraction is progressive or repressive. In a strongly homophobic society, a literary critic glossing over the homosexuality of an author, or the homosexual content and themes of a text, can be protective, and even progressive, insofar as it allows such authors and texts to enter the public arena. In a society more accepting of homosexuality, such glossing over, especially when endemic of a discipline or forum, is equivalent to saying that homosexuality is beneath notice, or at least irrelevant. This dissertation posits that such silence is not only passively repressive but also actively contributes to the marginalization of homosexuals. The counterargument that some forms of literary analysis are simply not concerned with sexuality is specious, as in the absence of comment, heterosexuality is assumed. Desire is at the heart of this dissertation, which holds that desire is an organizing force of both people and texts. In terms of both, I build upon the work of psychoanalytic theorists such as Teresa de Lauretis, who in The Practice of Love (1994) reads Freud’s theory of linear, phallic, heterosexual development through a lens that allows maturity to 15 assume a variety of sexual forms, including homosexuality as well as a less fixed, more broadly queer sexuality: Normal sexuality then would name a particular result of the process of negotiation with both the external and the internal worlds; it would designate the achievement, on the part of the subject, of the kind of sexual organization that a particular society and its institutions have decreed to be normal. And in this sense, indeed, normal becomes totally coextensive and synonymous with normative. (23) Normativity thus demands that “free” sexuality be “fixed”—and fixed in a particular way—if its owner is to easily accrue the benefits of being normal. De Lauretis offers a model of psychosexual progression that is freed from this societal straightjacket: A sexuality of component instincts, which, unlike infantile polymorphous perversion, is inclusive of phallic and genital drives but, unlike ‘normal’ sexuality, is not bound to a necessary phallic, genital, and heterosexual primacy. (xix) Here, de Lauretis clarifies that she does not envision a chaotic, unorganized sexuality, but rather a psychosexual development where “certain object relations do become privileged in individual subjectivities as a result of each contingent and singular history” (23). This development is not normative, but particular to each individual. I read de Lauretis in concert with the work of theorists such as Beverly Burch, Ken Corbett, Leslie Deutsch, and Richard Isay, who posit the specifics of a psychosocial development into mature homosexuality. 7 I believe that these models can be useful and “true” for certain individuals without being normative; they illustrate pathways by which “certain object relations do become privileged in individual subjectivities” (de Lauretis 23). For instance, both Corbett and Deutsch, working independently, switch the genders of the Oedipal complex, so that the proto-lesbian girl identifies with her father 16 and desires her mother, and the proto-gay boy does the reverse. Such a model accounts for proto-gay children not as perverse, but as attempting to psychosexually progress and differentiate according to an inherent tendency. All the above gay and lesbian developmental models discuss the frequent disconnect between chronological and psychosocial age among gay men and women, and the phenomenon of the proto-gay adult who, due to homophobia, may be chronologically mature but nonetheless not yet homosexually realized: who, in other words, has not yet internally “come out.” I spend some time discussing the difficulty, if not impossibility, of differentiating between the “truly” sexually fluid and those who experience such fluidity as part of their psychosexual development. The word “proto-homosexual” in and of itself exemplifies the tension between the notion of homosexuality as an inherent orientation that may take a variety of forms according to historical circumstances but nonetheless is rooted in sexual attraction to the same sex, and the notion of homosexuality as an entirely cultural institution, as influentially posited by Michel Foucault in Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, which states that homosexual identity and psychology did not exist before 1870, though homosexual acts did (43). At bottom, this disagreement concerns whether sexuality is an inherent part of identity, and whether homosexuality is a transhistorical phenomenon: whether we can, for instance, discuss women of different cultures and times who preferred, against considerable opposition, to experience love and sex with other women as lesbian. This is what Susan McCabe calls the paradox of queer historicism: “the transhistorical existence of historical pluralism—in other words, a history continuously 17 riddled by multiple desires as well as nominations for sexual behaviors and experience” (121). The concept of proto-homosexuality attempts to reconcile these positions by asserting that a given person does not entirely fit our current understanding of homosexuality. Someone who is proto-homosexual is in some way not homosexual as we understand the term—either in terms of acts, identity, or self-knowledge—but could be and probably would be if obstacles were removed. Gay pre-adolescents may therefore be called “proto-homosexual,” as can people and characters who demonstrably experience same-sex desire, passion, and love, but who cannot act upon or even name such sensations and emotions because they are forbidden, or because these feelings and actions are inconceivable due to cultural particulars. Without holding to a strictly social constructionist view of sexuality and the self, I do historicize how homosexuality played out on the fields of people, texts, and the social mechanisms that connect people and texts. For this purpose, I employ the concept of “hegemonic masculinity”: R.W. Connell’s adaptation of Antonio Gramsci’s analysis of class relations, in which one group claims and sustains dominance over society. Connell defines “hegemonic masculinity” as “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answers to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (Masculinities 77). Connell stresses that there are multiple masculinities, and that specifics of the currently dominant masculinity change over time. In the twentieth-century United States, however, male homosexuals were consistently at the bottom of the male scale, due to the inversion model that views homosexuality as the 18 adoption of behavior typical of the opposite sex. Masculine hegemony placed men who “acted” like women at the bottom of the scale, as they “aped” a subordinated class— though wealth, fame, and other socially valuable assets might allow a homosexual to rise. Lesbians both shared in the subordination of women and came in for special subordination, as they didn’t share in the “‘fit’ between hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity” (Connell “Hegemonic” 62). In other words, they messed up the binary. Throughout the dissertation, I consider the material as well as ideological practices that attempted to thwart and denigrate the achievement of a mature, embodied, homosexual self. Hegemonic oppression and repression is one way to understand the link between the queer and the gay, or what I call the “broadly queer” and the “specifically gay.” I use these terms to distinguish between homosexuality and other traits, behaviors, and phenomena that are degraded or otherwise viewed and treated as counter to the dominant order. In the twentieth-century United States, the specifically gay was almost always broadly queer, but the broadly queer was only sometimes specifically gay. Both Capote—an effeminate, precocious Southerner who made a show of his strangeness— and Stein—a large Jewish expatriate who was markedly disinterested in being conventionally attractive, and who associated with avant-garde artists—were extraordinarily broadly queer in terms of their appearance, behavior, public persona, and the form and the content of their writing. This broad queerness interacted in complex ways with their specific homosexuality, and with the trope of the decadent, unconventional artist—a way that queerness may be celebrated, or at least tolerated, by 19 the dominant order. It is too simple, however, to view Capote’s and Stein’s flamboyance as a “disguise” for their homosexuality, for if such flamboyance were so readily available as a form of heterosexual passing, then Capote and Stein would not be so unusual. The specifics of the particular relationships between the broadly queer and the specifically gay are a constant concern in this dissertation. As the broadly queer does not equal the specifically gay, so a “homosexual reading” is not necessarily a “queer reading.” As I employ the term, a “homosexual reading” recognizes (1) the existence of homosexuality, (2) its status as an organizing principle for homosexuals (though not for all who practice homosexual behavior), and (3) the impact of masculine hegemony upon this centrality. A homosexual reading holds that for those whose psyches are organized around homosexuality, a conscious, embodied, and positive relationship with gay desire is a valuable accomplishment, especially in a homophobic society that denies its possibility. A homosexual reading may be further differentiated by gender. For instance, a lesbian reading is not a gay, bisexual, or transsexual reading, and is mindful of the complexity of the historical similarities and differences between the experiences of women who primarily desire women and the experiences of other men and women who also differ from the sexual norm. It is preoccupied with questions of female same-sexual desire and its manifestations, and how these manifestations are understood and received. Furthermore, a lesbian reading always keeps the strength of the historical constraints on lesbian expression and interpretation in mind, and is alert to the prevalence of historical and present-day homophobia, both internalized and externalized, both conscious and 20 unconscious. A “lesbian reading,” as I use the term, views a conscious, embodied identity based on same-sexual desire, especially before the Women’s and Gay Rights’ movement, as an achievement, though not a necessary one, nor one necessarily better than other options. Last, this dissertation argues that writing can profoundly influence readers, and through them, larger social networks. This is a precept of literary study, and I would leave it unspoken if it were not for Henry Abelove’s point that literature is often neglected in histories of gay liberation: “the mode of social history that came of age in the 1970s, and grew to maturity and achieved many fine successes in the era following, has made little room for writing as a productive force” (72). Abelove argues that queer- themed writing from the two decades before Stonewall “was enormously productive for GLF [the Gay Liberation Front], its members and its milieu, and significantly contributed to the development of its outlook and values” (71). Abelove does not, however, include Capote and Stein among the cohort he calls the “Queer Commuters”—named for their expatriation in the face of post-World War II homophobia—that includes James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Jane and Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and others. 8 Though Stein and Capote may not be in the cohort that influenced the members of New York’s Gay Liberation Front, they were certainly not only read by homosexuals and proto-homosexuals in the twenty years before Stonewall, but also served as essential influences on gay men and women before and after Stonewall, and were highly significant to the gay and lesbian rights movement as a whole. 9 This dissertation expands the parameters of Abelove’s argument past the NYGLF to a broader 21 spectrum of gay men and women and the specific process by which gay-themed texts reached these readers, as well as to the psychological impact of these texts. Chapter Outlines The first chapter, “Young, Effeminate, and Strange: Photographic Portraits of Young Truman Capote,” is organized around three related homosexual teleologies: how Joel Knox, the hero of Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (hereafter Other Voices) offers a portrait of a proto-gay boy progressing to gay maturity; how Capote in his early career came to embody a sexualized yet somehow still pre-adolescent proto-gay boy; and how this authorial persona brought Capote fame and riches in a society that denied homosexual childhood and disparaged and censored homosexuality. I consider how Capote’s celebrity persona allowed Other Voices (1947) to avoid the censorship and opprobrium directed against Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Charles Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (“The Kinsey Report”), though Other Voices shared the gay content and bestseller status, and though Vidal and Kinsey published their books less than six months after Other Voices, in 1948. I trace the material trajectory of Capote’s quick rise to fame from his first published short story, “Miriam” (1945), through two photoessays in LIFE magazine (1946 and 47) that featured Capote in a prominent position despite his slender credentials, to the success of Other Voices, and link the height of that trajectory to the force of Capote’s photographic portraits. These photographs portrayed Capote as fabulously young, effeminate, and strange—a triad of broad queerness that both broadcast and disguised Capote’s 22 homosexuality. Reviews of Other Voices were preoccupied with this visual spectacle at the same time that they did their best to ignore and dismiss the gay content of the novel— a focus that deflected the discussion of Capote’s and Other Voices’ homosexuality into visual terms, and allowed the written discussion of Capote and his novel to remain broadly queer rather than specifically gay. I examine both Capote’s public persona and the proto-gay hero of Other Voices in the context of (1) the midcentury understanding of gay childhood as a perversion of proper psychosexual development, (2) the creation of “Childhood Gender Identity Disorder” by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980 as a means to pathologize gay children once homosexuality was delisted as a mental problem, and (3) contemporary theories of proto-gay subjectivities, especially that of Ken Corbett. Chapter 2 adds literary and academic culture to the previous chapter’s consideration of Capote, homosexuality, and the mass market. “Capote, Forster, and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture at Mid-Century” revolves around a 1947 confrontation on the New Haven Railroad between Capote and cultural critics Lionel and Diana Trilling over L. Trilling’s failure in a recent monograph to consider E. M. Forster’s homosexuality. Capote and the Trillings all believed that literature could and should challenge a dominant ideology on behalf of the individual, yet each reached a different reckoning of how this challenge might be met and to what end. All three personally resisted social hegemony, but in three distinct primary registers: ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. And all three could not be easily reduced to one school or philosophy, and were known for the subtle gradations and self-conscious contradictions of their work. 23 Capote’s insistence that Forster’s homosexuality is relevant to the analysis of his work forced the Trillings to the limits of liberal humanism as it was then practiced, and challenged their identity as literary critics devoted to social justice. Capote and Diana Trilling’s different reports of this argument, as well as Lionel Trilling’s silence, exemplify the complex relations between gender, sexual orientation, and leftist politics among the New Critics, the New York Intellectuals, and postwar literary culture in general. I pay particular attention to the gendering of places of publication and types of writing as revealed by Leslie Fiedler and other mid-century critics. Chapter 2 proposes that this gendering has affected Capote’s academic reputation, and his low status in gay and lesbian studies today. According to Fiedler’s rubric, Capote was effeminate in terms of the genre and material context of his writing, as well as in terms of his public persona. This triple effeminacy explains the particularly harsh reception of Capote by female critics such as Diana Trilling and Elizabeth Hardwick who published in “male” forums (such as Partisan Review and The Nation) and “male” genres (such as “serious” criticism) but nonetheless consistently found that their gender trumped their intellectual production. I argue that Capote’s triple effeminacy also explains why the lion’s share of academic attention paid to him concerns In Cold Blood, his most “masculine” and least overtly gay work. Along similar lines, the discordance between Capote’s reputation as a careerist, frivolous celebrity and post-Stonewall constructions of male homosexuality made Capote and his work an unappealing topic of study for post-Stonewall critics. The next generation of critics—who usually viewed themselves as conducting “queer” rather 24 than “gay and lesbian” studies—also found Capote uninteresting. Neither Capote’s celebrity nor his homosexuality ever diminished in the public eye, and so “queering” Capote had little appeal. I argue that this tripartite rejection explains the otherwise bewilderingly slender corpus of criticism about this bestselling, critically respected, and openly gay author. In short, this chapter recuperates Capote as an intellectual and gay proto-activist who insisted in the face of authorities who could hurt his career that the recognition and interpretation of an author’s homosexuality is not only relevant but also necessary to literary analysis. Chapter 2 considers how Capote’s homosexuality has configured his place in literary and academic culture at the same time that his homosexuality was not seen as a worthwhile subject of study; Chapter 3 does the same for Gertrude Stein. Stein stands alone as the only twentieth-century canonical lesbian writer to be both a mass-market celebrity and consistently identifiable as broadly queer, if not necessarily specifically gay. Stein’s rarity is due in part to the gendered difference that splits public reactions to homosexuality throughout the twentieth century: male hypervisibility vs. female invisibility. Chapter 3—“The Apparitional Lesbian Endureth, or Why Has Three Lives Not Been Directly Read in Lesbian Terms?”—applies Terry Castle’s concept of the apparitional lesbian to Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1909), Stein’s first published work, and a canonical modernist text. I survey ninety-nine years of Stein criticism to substantiate how the overt lesbianism of Three Lives has been sidelined or ignored—sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of a desire to protect Stein’s reputation, sometimes out of slavish or 25 unknowing adherence to disciplinary constraints—and how today’s academy as well as yesterday’s literary establishment are complicit with the position that lesbian lives are beneath notice. Though homosexual love and sex is repeatedly and openly narrated and dramatized in Three Lives, and though Stein is a lesbian icon whose queerness is understood as a fundamental factor of her text, Three Lives has to this day not been read in Castle’s “lesbian terms.” I examine the material circumstances around the publication of Three Lives and its early reviews in the light of the text’s status as a lesbian expansion of the naturalist project of extending what could be represented in fiction. I then ask how and why the lesbian aspects of Three Lives have been both obscured and ignored by a literary culture that has based the majority of its readings of Stein’s life and art in terms of broad queerness. I corroborate the different ways female homosexuality has been read in Stein’s oeuvre with the traditional rubrics for reading Three Lives: first, in terms of “Melanctha” to the exclusion of the other two parts of the text, “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena”; second, in terms of the style of “Melanctha” and its place in modernism; and third, in terms of racial issues. These rubrics, despite their frequent superficial attention to female homosexuality, actually serve to deflect substantive investigation into lesbian content and themes. For instance, the overt lesbianism of “Melanctha” is neglected in favor of theories of how lesbianism is encoded in terms of racialized heterosexuality. I follow this substantiation and analysis of dearth with a lesbian exposition of Three Lives. In Chapter 4, I read Three Lives as a naturalist portrait of three proto- 26 lesbians marginalized by class, ethnicity, and race in a small Southern city at the turn of the twentieth century. I depart from the usual practice of considering Three Lives as a modernist text to view it as an extension of the realist project to depict characters and subjects that had previously been considered inappropriate for literature, and through this exposure, to raise social awareness and urge change. The text’s non-linear style and repudiation of linear form offer a realistic rendering of women whose primary emotional and sexual tendencies are demonstrably homosexual, but who are prevented by homophobic historical circumstances from acting upon their desires or letting them become conscious, or from valuing them if they do experience them. I show that for all three heroines, Stein establishes both their same-sex desire and the internalized homophobia that hides and thwarts this desire. Through these heroines, Stein offers three degrees of the apparitional lesbian, from the entirely spectral to the sexually substantial but ultimately still ghostly in lesbian terms. The hero of “The Gentle Lena,” the most damaged of the three women, can neither conceptualize nor act upon her desires; her sexuality can only be understood in terms of her fragmentation, for her only experience of desire, will, and pleasure comes in a same- sexual context, while active heterosexuality effectively kills her. The hero of “The Good Anna” channels her erotics into an idealized homosexual romance and dies sexually untouched; she achieves psychological, financial, and social stability at the cost of a conscious or embodied sexuality, as well as a compulsive need to enforce proper sex roles and behavior for others as well as herself. The hero of “Melanctha,” the most psychosexually evolved of the three, struggles to understand and to express herself 27 sexually, and to understand how her society prevents her and others from achieving this understanding and this expression. Her partial success requires Stein to avoid telling Melanctha’s story candidly and unambiguously if Three Lives was to be published. Stein had learned this lesson with her two previous and unpublished lesbian novels. I argue that part of Melanctha’s sexual “wandering”—in terms of the gender of her love objects, if not their number—may be a necessary compromise to allow the publication of what is essentially a lesbian work. In a trope that recurs throughout the twentieth century, female homosexuality is only made available to the mass market when it is swathed in the comfortable veils of heterosexual context and racial otherness. Chapter 5—“Gertrude Stein, 1909-1933: From Broadly Queer to Specifically Lesbian”—parallels Chapter 1, in that both trace the material history of a public persona that pivoted between broad queerness and specific homosexuality to bring Stein great fame, and Stein’s books great marketing, distribution, and sales. Chapter 5 addresses the mystery, dulled by familiarity and time, of how Stein won mainstream fame, riches, celebrity, and respect for The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This biography of a lesbian domestic partnership links Stein and Toklas in its title, offers photographs of the women at home, relates their more than twenty years together, and makes the women’s sexuality as clear as possible without ever specifying their homosexuality. Stein’s impropriety extended far beyond either her sexuality or her association with the visual modernists for which she first became known. Why was she acceptable to the mass market at all, when she was an obviously Jewish expatriate at a time when Jews and foreigners were viewed with dislike and distaste in the United States, and when she was 28 unmarried, financially independent, unashamedly physically large, and sartorially androgynous, and thus defied feminine convention in an unfashionable way? I argue that the sheer quantity and flagrant bulk of Stein’s broadly queer attributes disarmed and charmed the public—and that Stein’s queer plethora signified her as lesbian to an audience primed for such reception by their own same-sexual erotics and identity. The broad queerness of Stein’s public persona thus collaborated with the historic invisibility of lesbians in the public eye to allow The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas to avoid the homophobic censure and censorship that would otherwise be earned by a blatant written and visual description of a female same-sex relationship. I conduct this argument by considering the history of Stein’s public persona up to 1933, with particular attention to her sales, the growth and shifts of her celebrity, and the broadly queer and specifically lesbian aspects of her persona. I consider the various debuts of Stein’s celebrity persona, none of which have received sustained analysis, and some of which have received none: the first appearance of Stein as a “personality,” in the February 13, 1910, New York Press; the first parody of Stein to appear in a mass-market magazine, published in the March 22, 1913 Saturday Evening Post; the World War I poems by Stein in Life and Vanity Fair magazine that earned Stein her widest readership until the Autobiography; and the September 11, 1933 cover story on Stein in TIME magazine that served as Stein’s debut as a respectable, mainstream celebrity, rather than a laughable spectacle of the avant-garde. I also consider three aspects of Stein’s authorial persona that don’t have a proper debut: the phenomenon of Stein as a visual spectacle, the appreciation of Stein’s work as objets d’art rather than literature, and the surprising 29 misconception of Stein as a decadent femme fatale that was prevalent both before and after the publication of The Autobiography. I conclude Chapter 5—and the dissertation—by considering Janet Malcolm’s recent, well-received Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007). Despite the author’s history and reputation as an inquisitor of institutional and disciplinary “secrets,” Two Lives is relentlessly conventional in its treatment of Stein, Toklas, and homosexuality. Like so many before her, Malcolm goes to great—and presumably unconscious—lengths to avoid discussing the homosexuality of Stein and Toklas, or the homophobia that surrounded them, as relevant to her putative subject of their “two lives.” She chooses instead to focus on issues of style and ethnicity—a specific pattern that I trace throughout my chapters on Stein, and broadly throughout the entire dissertation. Conclusion This dissertation contributes to the understanding of two Twentieth-Century authors whose texts have fallen into an abyss between the historic closeting of gay and lesbian author and texts, and the exuberant searching for “new” and “hidden” queer authors, text, and content by gay, lesbian, and queer critics. By ignoring the most obvious manifestations of gay and lesbian writing in the twentieth century, scholars are complicit with the homophobia that historically kept the homosexuality of Stein and Capote from direct recognition and application to their texts. Fabulous Potency attempts to correct that complicity. The lack of gay and lesbian-centered study of two of the most iconically gay writers of the twentieth century should not be allowed to speak for itself. 30 Endnotes for Introduction 1 The Kinsey scale was proposed in the Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948): “While emphasizing the continuity of the gradations between exclusively heterosexual and exclusively homosexual histories, it has seemed desirable to develop some sort of classification which could be based on the relative amounts of heterosexual and homosexual experience or response in each history... A seven-point scale comes nearer to showing the many gradations that actually exist (656). While the scale, which ranged from 0 to 6, was created to expose and emphasize sexual fluidity, Kinsey did reserve 0 (exclusively heterosexual) and 6 (exclusively homosexual) for subjects such as Capote and Stein whose sexual history did not exhibit such variation. 2 If undergraduates are adults, then one possible exception in Stein’s case was her research partner and friend, Leon Solomons. After reading Stein’s undergraduate diaries, Linda Wagner-Martin has concluded that their friendship was “both intellectual and sexual,” though she also notes how Stein, in her college diary writes that she and Solomons are “Platonic because neither care to do more. She and he both have their moments but they know each other and it is not worthwhile” (37). 3 Cf. the two fundamental texts of queer theory: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991). Though both Butler and Sedgwick write in the service of understanding the oppression of sexual minorities and dismantling heterosexual hegemony, their destabilizing of identity categories and their deconstruction of “fixed” sexuality is as “destructive” of homosexuality as it is of heterosexuality. Such “destruction” is experienced differently by heterosexuals and homosexuals, due to the overwhelming amount of institutional support—both formal and informal—for heterosexuality. 4 Though Other Voices, Other Rooms is often dated from 1948, it was published in December 1947. 5 Cf. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” where Spivak defines “strategic essentialism” as a strategy that the disadvantaged may effectively use to present themselves. While strong differences may exist between members of these groups, it is sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily “essentialize” themselves and bring forward their group identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals. Considering Capote and Stein from the level of lived experience—a level at which they are, indeed, essentially gay—allows me to consider the relevance of their homosexuality to their personae and art. 6 The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), Foundlings (2001), and Deep Gossip (2003) are all considerations of homosexuality before Stonewall—often, more than a century before— and as such repudiate the notion that homosexuality is entirely cultural constructed. 31 Castle, Nealon, and Abelove also share a belief that literature can help configure the form that homosexuality takes, both in an individual and in society at large. In The Apparitional Lesbian (1993), Castle both identifies a lesbian presence in literature, history, and culture of the past three centuries and investigates how and why this presence has been ignored and explained away. I discuss Castle’s work in Chapters 3 and 4. In Foundlings (2001), Nealon analyzes work by homosexual men and women from 1900-1950 in the service of establishing how simultaneous disaffiliation from and desire for hegemonic models of family, nation, and history serve as a link between the inversion and ethnic models of homosexuality. In doing so, he uses queer theory and historicist literary and cultural criticism in the service of examining how the form, rather than the nature, of homosexuality is socially constructed. In Deep Gossip, Abelove conducts historical analyses of gay and lesbian culture, politics, and psychoanalysis that take issue with the championing of queer fluidity and assert a transhistorical gay and lesbian identity. 7 Burch presents her developmental schema in Lesbian/Bisexual Experience and Other Women: Psychoanalytic Views of Women (1997) 15-87. Corbett’s developmental schema is presented in “Cross-Gendered Identifications and Homosexual Boyhood: Toward a More Complex Theory of Gender” (1998), “More Life: Centrality and Marginality in Human Development” (2001), and, especially, “Homosexual Boyhood: Notes on Girlyboys” (1996). Deutsch’s development schema is outlined in “Out of the Closet and on to the Couch: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Lesbian Development,” included in Glassgold and Iasenza’s Lesbians and Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Theory and Practice (1995), an anthology of articles by lesbian psychoanalysts, including Burch. Glassgold and Iasenza’s second anthology—Lesbians, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis: The Second Wave (2004)—is much more influenced by social constructionism, and as such does not present or strongly imply a lesbian developmental schema. Richard Isay presents his theory of male gay psychosocial development most coherently in Becoming Homosexual: Gay Men and Their Development (1989) and most accessibly in Becoming Gay: The Journey to the Self (1997). 8 Abelove defines the Queer Commuters as writers who (1) left the United States after World War II; (2) were “personally and artistically interested in same-sex eroticism…all made the representation of such eroticism part of their writing”; and (3) were “convinced that decolonization was a paramount aspect of the world as they knew and lived it…most wrote in ways that inflected this conviction” (73). Both Stein and Capote fulfill two of the membership requirements for the Queer Commuters handsomely. Capote lived and traveled outside of the United States for much of the 1950s, and Stein lived in France from 1907 until her death in 1946. Both certainly made sexuality a primary concern of their writing! Anti-colonialism, however, does not feature heavily in Stein and Capote’s lives or work, and it would be difficult to abstract from their writing what Abelove calls “a rhetoric for connecting queerness to decolonization and its struggles” (80). In this sense, Stein, and especially Capote, do not “fit” many of the politics of the Gay 32 Liberation Front. In fact, Capote was seen as part of an antiquated vision of homosexuality that many politically active gay men pitted themselves against—a fact that I discuss in Chapters 1 and 2. 9 Chronological objections to Stein and Capote being part of the Queer Commuters are questionable with Stein and flimsy with Capote. Though Stein predates Abelove’s cohort, her most overtly lesbian writing was published after her death in 1946—and the lack of lesbian writers at this time (Abelove offers only Bishop and Bowles) makes Stein’s utility more pronounced. Capote was about a decade younger than Bishop and the Bowleses, and the same age as Baldwin, though his early success makes him seem to be a member of an earlier generation. 33 Chapter One: Young, Effeminate, and Strange Photographic Portraits of Young Truman Capote At First Sight We first see Joel Knox—the hero of Truman Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1947)—from the perspective of Sam Radclif, a truck driver who offers the reader, as truck drivers so often do, a “real” man’s view. Knox needs a ride, but Radclif hesitates. He sees something queer about the boy: Radclif eyed the boy over the rim of his beer glass, not caring much for the looks of him. He had his notions of what a “real” boy should look like, and this kid somehow offended them. He was too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned; each of his features was shaped with a sensitive accuracy, and a girlish tenderness softened his eyes, which were brown and very large. His brown hair, cut short, was streaked with pure yellow strands (6). Knox’s queerness is seen as an inappropriate femininity, which coincides with an understanding of homosexuality as a perverse femininity instead of an alternate masculinity. Radclif’s overt wish to correct Knox’s queerness later slides into covert attraction: “He [Radclif] took a deep swallow of beer, let forth a mighty belch, and grinned. ‘Yessir, if I was your Pa I’d take down your britches and muss you up a little bit’ (p. 8). Knox’s offensiveness to Radclif, and Radclif’s fantasy of assuming a paternal role—of being a Pa who undresses Knox, disrupt his neat surface, and instructs him in properly masculine crudities—neatly encapsulates the push-and-pull between fascination and repulsion with homosexuality for the postwar public, whose homosexual desires were screened by disgust and a will for correction even as they thrust forth. Through this trucker, Capote instructs those readers who do not identify with Knox how to take both his hero and himself. The straight-identified may be disturbed 34 and want to “fix” the queer man, but ultimately their desire fuels his ride: As the butch Radclif is pressed by his desire into Joel’s service, so the straight public read and celebrated Capote. In this chapter, I investigate how Capote used his public persona to achieve celebrity because of, rather than despite, his identity as a gay man. How did Capote conflate popular anxieties and his own queer textual and visual expression to his advantage—and how did his “fabulous potency” allow him to both eschew hegemonic masculinity and dominate a public body racked by postwar repression after wartime permissiveness? 1 And how did Capote’s fame help assert a subjectivity that was unintelligible as well as unspeakable—that of the specifically gay boy who properly develops into a gay man? The Public Persona of Truman Capote Other Voices, Other Rooms was published in December 1947, less than a month before Charles Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male—“The Kinsey Report”— and Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. All three were New York Times bestsellers. One of Kinsey’s most noted findings was that homosexual activity was practiced by ordinary folk: homosexual activity did not, as held by contemporary psychoanalytic theory, indicate effeminacy and immaturity. 2 Nor did same-sex desire indicate a homosexual orientation. Though these findings shocked the public, the Kinsey Report was shielded to an extent by the respectability of science; by the false belief that Kinsey and his assistants, as proper scientists, did not participate in the behaviors that they 35 studied; and by the fact that homosexuality was only part of the spectrum of male sexuality that made up Kinsey’s report. Though The City and the Pillar also differentiated between effeminacy, immaturity, homosexual desire, and a homosexual orientation, Vidal, as a novelist, lacked Kinsey’s protective shielding. The centrality of homosexuality to the novel, and the novel’s blunt and unambiguous treatment of homosexuality, made it exceptionally difficult to review the novel without directly mentioning homosexuality, which broke with the standards and practices of many periodicals. Yet the high reputation of Vidal’s first novel, Williwaw (1946) 3 , made The City difficult to ignore, and Vidal’s position as the son of a famous All-American quarterback and Olympic athlete, and his relation to a grand Southern family that included a senator and several other prominent government officials and industrialists, put many editors and reviewers in a difficult position. The butch concerns of Williwaw—at once a war novel and a man-against-nature novel set in the Aleutian Islands, which had been marketed and reviewed in relation to Vidal’s own just-completed military service—supported The City’s separation of homosexuality and effeminacy, which made the position of editors and reviewers even less tenable. If homosexuality could only be mentioned gingerly, then a homosexuality that couldn’t be alluded to via immaturity and effeminacy was unmentionable. Editors and reviewers were generally left ill-disposed to the author, and several important newspapers, journals, and magazines—including Time and the daily New York Times—refused to review the novel altogether. With a few exceptions, those reviews that did appear ran from poor to scathing. While Vidal’s sales did benefit from the resulting 36 controversy (ads read, “Some rave about it…brilliant…some are shocked… disgusting…but it became a bestseller”), Vidal’s literary career was effectively forestalled. Vidal published one novel in 1949 (The Season of Comfort), two in 1950 (The Search for the King and Dark Green, Bright Red), one in 1952 (The Judgment of Paris), and one in 1954 (Messiah). Reviews and sales were poor, and The New York Times—whose opinion had the most clout with the most people—refused to discuss these novels at all. 4 By contrast, Capote collaborated with public silences around and understandings of homosexuality to his professional advantage. Capote succeeded by constructing a public image that became fixed in the public eye through the widespread exposure of his author’s photo from Other Voices, Other Rooms. In the context of Capote’s two previous exposures in LIFE magazine, the spectacular notoriety of Other Voices’ dust jacket is revealed as the climax of a brilliant campaign of self-representation. Capote’s photographic portraits, like his description of Knox, allow their subject to both be recognized as gay and to be seen and discussed not as gay, but as non-specifically queer—as effeminate, childish, and strange. These deviations were less threatening than the bald assertion of sexual difference. Here, Capote enters into the tradition of gay and lesbian writers such as Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, and Tennessee Williams whose notoriety both broadcast their gay identity and disguised its particulars with a general outrageousness that played to a broad audience. Like many artists known for flamboyance, Capote purposefully stoked his fire: his notoriety was as misleading as it was self-made. For though Capote was understood as effeminate, he was neither soft, delicate, nor weak. Nor can a man who maneuvered one 37 of the most successful literary careers of his day be called childish. Capote’s early success speaks of an early maturity—a precociousness that, granted, re-inscribes the childishness it supposedly refutes. Capote’s strangeness is more straightforward. Any successful novelist at 22 is by definition strange, especially if he walked a queer path to a fabulous apotheosis. If the definition of “fabulous” extends across the divide between the real and the unreal, with that extension understood as a good—if “fabulous” simultaneously means marvelous or superb; exceptionally good or unusual; on the verge of credibility; told through fables or myths; and purely imaginary—then to be a gay American in the late 1940s was to be fabulous—fabulous!—and to witness one’s fabulosity devoured by a public who simultaneously praised gay men as tasty and spat them out in disgust. Capote’s potency came through his ability to enhance his status as a writer by manipulating this oscillation between praise and scorn. For the definitive register of meaning in these author’s photos is professional: Capote is pictured as a writer of texts so spectacular that their author is worthy of visual representation. Capote in LIFE The first nationally-distributed photograph of Truman Capote was published on July 15, 1946, in “LIFE Visits Yaddo,” a photo-essay by Lisa Larsen. 5 Yaddo is a prestigious artists’ colony, set on the estate of a Victorian Gothic mansion in upstate New York; residents are recommended by leaders in their fields, and room and board are free. Capote was not an obvious recruit. He had published his first short story, “My Side of 38 the Matter,” in Story in 1945, when he was nineteen. That same year he also published three stories, among them “Miriam,” his first critical success, and the winner of an O. Henry prize—a good start, but not enough to make Capote an obvious recruit to the colony. 6 Though the stories had brought Capote some attention, and though he worked for (and been fired from) The New Yorker as a copyboy, Capote had not received nearly enough notice to be accepted to the colony. 7 He did, however, have a powerful friend in the novelist Carson McCullers. McCullers recommended Capote to Random House, which offered Capote a contract for what would become Other Voices, Other Rooms. She also arranged for Capote’s acceptance to Yaddo. 8 If Capote’s presence at Yaddo was noteworthy, his prominence in Larsen’s photo- essay by number, order, and size is remarkable. LIFE’s readers were led to assume a greater status for Capote than he in fact had. Yaddo’s residents in the summer of 1946 included composer Aaron Copland; writers McCullers, Katharine Anne Porter, and Marguerite Young; and literary critics Newton Arvin and Granville Hicks—all prominent in the art and literary world, and some famous without. There are nine photographs in the essay, in which Arvin, a director of the Yaddo foundation, appears in three. Hicks, another director, appears in two—as does Capote. No one else appears more than once. The first picture in the essay, and the only full-page picture in the essay, is a portrait of Capote and Marguerite Young, best known today for her two-volume novel Miss Macintosh, My Darling (1965) (fig. 1). By size alone, Capote is the essay’s largest figure. Young, by contrast, sits in an oversized bishop’s chair, which makes her seem small. 39 Capote’s prominence in the essay both by size and number does not prevent Larsen from constructing Capote as juvenile. Capote sits at the feet of Young, who Fig. 1: Truman Capote and Marguerite Young. By Lisa Larsen. LIFE 15 July 1946:110. herself sits cross-legged in a bishop’s chair, like Alice’s caterpillar on its mushroom. Capote gazes up at Young intently, mouth open. Despite the photo’s caption, which states that “Guests…are discouraged from reading manuscripts to each other,” Young seems to be reading a manuscript—his? hers?—and instructing Capote—a mother 40 reading to her young, or in the photo’s otherworldly surroundings, a sorcerer to her apprentice. The photo’s construction of Capote as young is bolstered by the caption: “Marguerite Young…likes to sit in a bishop’s chair stuffed with pillows. Her companion is 21 year-old Truman Capote, short-story writer.” Young dominates syntactically; she is the subject of the photo, while Capote is reduced to “her companion.” Note the pointed reference to Capote’s age, which emphasizes his subordination to Young, whose own age is obscure. Young’s name, which contradicts her appearance, contributes a semantic confusion to the already-present confusion of an older, smaller figure placed in authority over a younger, bigger one. This topsy-turvy backdrop of text and image bolsters Capote’s own exhibition of youthfulness—the disheveled formal clothes and childish bangs that combine to make Capote a dressed-up little boy. This heightening of Capote’s youth through the conspicuous failure of signifiers of age and formality will recur through his portraits. Capote here plays a traditional trick of upper-class schoolboys and the preppy men they become, whose too-young clothes reinforce their status as the masculine standard, so secure they may dispense with certain signs of maturity. Capote’s “youth,” by contrast, permits his effeminate display. What’s cute in boys may threaten in men, and LIFE was unlikely to picture a mature man “at home” in his chignon. But consider Capote’s bangs, girlish as well as childish. Then consider Capote’s left foot, which reads as dainty—girlish—effeminate—within its sock and shoe. The white sock is the brightest object in the photo, which draws the eye to what initially reads as a woman’s stocking, due to the height of Capote’s cuff, hiked to be level with his seat, which leaves 41 visible a length of white hose that through its extension connotes a woman’s leg. The combination of white stocking and black penny loafer, common to private and parochial schoolgirl uniforms, adds a further girlish touch. 9 The loafer itself dangles from Capote’s foot, which is raised and pointed as if Capote is a dancer who chomps to practice extensions—a pose that under the time’s rigorous policing of male movement would have evoked the ballerina and her iconic femininity, or the even more iconic effeminacy of the male dancer. Larsen’s photo puns on the contemporary expression “light in his loafers,” with its double reference to homosexuality through both effeminate walking and the ethereal steps of fairies. Effeminacy is also conveyed through the feminine particularities of the angle and extension of Capote’s cigarette, and through the small silver cigarette case obscuring his crotch. If cigarettes and their cases are often employed and read as displaced phalluses, then this case is small, neat, and pretty; though the case draws attention to Capote’s crotch, it does not connote size and power, the usual performance of the phallic substitute. The breakdown of gender binaries is not solely portrayed through Capote in this photo. Marguerite Young, in her blunt bob, lack of make-up, and carelessly-disheveled ratty clothes, puts Capote’s carefully-disheveled formal dress in relief. 10 The topsy- turviness that pervades the photo—Young as older but smaller; Capote as younger but bigger; Young as female but masculine; Capote as male but feminine; Young as authoritarian but lower-class; Capote as subservient but upper-class—is extended through Yaddo’s decor. Young’s bishop’s chair is echoed by the rest of the Victorian Gothic 42 furnishings, the heavy complications of which, in the context of Young and Capote’s interchange (though not in the rest of the essay) are fantastically enchanted rather than elaborately foreboding. Capote and Young are joined by a Classical female marble placed behind Capote and raised to a height where the statue seems to burst from his head, Athena-style. I would like to claim this idealized female figure as a commentary on the genders beneath her feet (iconic femininity resides within Capote, not Young), but the photo’s whimsy works against such portentousness. At the very least, the female figure is a passing goddess floating through a realm of fantasy. Capote’s second appearance in the photo-essay is a small solo shot: “In the tower room, once the secret hideaway of founder, Lady Katrina, who wrote poetry, young Author Truman Capote writes his first novel” (fig. 2). Doubly marked as young by the caption (young, first) and dwarfed—and thus made even younger—by the height of the room and the elaboration of the furniture, Capote writes at a Gothic Revival desk. His expression is strained and overwhelmed, which makes him younger still. Perhaps he is overwhelmed by the femininity that shadows him: by the ghostly Lady Katrina, whom the caption links to Capote by location and profession, and by the female marble bust that watches him strain. LIFE pictures Capote as young, effeminate, and strange—different enough from the male status quo to be attractive, even provocative, but not dangerous or threatening and so censored or destroyed. Capote’s photos, and the celebrity persona anchored by these photos, could thus push upon the poles of strict gender lines to vault him to stardom. Effeminacy, itself a product of fixed gender lines, powers a great deal of this propulsion. 43 Fig. 2: Capote in Tower Room. By Lisa Larsen. LIFE 15 July 1946: 112. Effeminate, Childish, and Strange: Definitions Effeminacy happens when traits, tastes, and looks that are traditionally feminine occur somewhere unexpected; the e in effeminate indicates the space between appropriate and inappropriate exhibitions of the feminine. This impropriety—and this exhibition—is symptomatic of times and places where masculinity and femininity form a dialectic: where men who are not “masculine” are by definition “feminine.” But these men cannot 44 be considered feminine because of the same rigid dialectic that prevents their consideration as masculine. And thus the e. The e in effeminate can be traced to the Latin verb effeminare, which combines femina, the Latin for woman, with the prefix ex, which here signifies that the action of a base verb has been carried to a conclusive point. As the evacuated cannot be emptied further, and as the exhilarated cannot be happier, so the effeminate is as feminine as possible, though still not a woman. The prefix ex can also mean formerly, as in exculpate (to make formerly guilty) and emasculate (to make formerly male). Emasculate derives from emasculare, a synonym of effeminare: both mean to castrate, and secondly, to make unmanly in less concrete terms. 11 This synonymy correlates with the Roman conflation of masculinity with virtue, as seen in the philological connection between vir (adult male) and virtus (moral excellence, strength, and valor), which leaves femininity a lack rather than a virtue unto itself. 12 Thus in English, after the Latin, women cannot be effeminated in the way that men can be emasculated, and women cannot be emasculate in the way that men can be effeminate. Femininity may not be cut out of the body, and when the feminine is masked, only the mask, rather than what lies beneath, may be seen. To speak of a masculine woman in a way that refers to her female-ness—in the way that “effeminate” refers to male-ness—English speakers must turn to words whose direct reference to female-ness dates from the late nineteenth century, such as butch and dyke. As women cannot be effeminate, so infants cannot be infantile. When a child is scolded for being childish, the scold indicates that the child’s action and attitude are 45 inappropriate from the scolder’s perspective—an impropriety that, for boys, is usually defined by a failure to adhere to a conventional code of masculinity. This hegemonic masculinity may changes its specifics over time, but not its desire to prevent masculine alternatives ”gaining cultural definition and recognition as alternatives, confining them to ghettoes, to privacy, to unconsciousness” (Connell “Hegemonic” 62). Boys who fail to “act their age” may thus be either inappropriately effeminate or immature, and “Stop acting like a girl” may not refer to specifically feminine behavior. Conversely, a homosexual boy may be effeminate not out of a desire to be girlish but out of a desire to express a masculinity that is different from straight masculinity but still masculine rather than feminine. Hegemonic masculinity, which values only itself and that which assists its value, smushes those who fail its exam into a vague wrongness defined by lack rather than what may actually be. 13 This collapse is heightened by the relaxed gender strictures of young children—a latitude considerably smaller for boys than for girls. Eve Sedgwick (1993) has investigated how the 1980 removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic guidelines coincides with the appearance of the diagnosis “Childhood Gender Identity Disorder,” which termed boys ill if they cross-dressed or preferred “girls’ pastimes,” while girls needed to believe that they had or would grow a penis to be so tagged. Standards have since been revised (2000), and different cultural expectations for the sexes acknowledged, but the APA still distinguishes between disordered boys’ desire for inappropriate activity and disordered girls’ refusal of expected activity, and notes the more frequent diagnosis of boys. As non-hegemonic masculinities, including but not limited to effeminacy, are observed, they 46 must be beaten down and out, as they trouble gender hegemony and threaten male privilege. The scolding of women, girls, and girlish boys sustains masculine privilege through the work of projection. Birth and death, as well as childishness and femininity, are in you and not me, says Hegemonic Dad—and Sam Radclif. Grow up like me—and live forever! Capote’s childishness—which he disentangles from immaturity, forging an alternate adult formation—made him both attractive and infuriating to those engaged in traditional male adulthood. His childishness furthermore both overtly removed him from adult sexual consideration and covertly referenced the Classical man-boy dynamic that may index homosexuality. So how did this bad boy avoid being sent to his room? How did he repeat Joel Knox’s trick of getting a normative culture to take him for a ride? Capote’s effeminacy and childishness were titrated to excuse the other, and to cloud the homosexuality that both revealed. The straight-identified could therefore safely (which meant blindly) place their queer desire in Capote’s depths. In addition, effeminacy and childishness were only two of Capote’s registers of strangeness. Consider the otherworldliness that we see in the LIFE photos, and that persists in many photos of Capote. Consider Capote’s Southern heritage and the American cultural schizophrenia towards what is both the “moral other and the moral center of U. S. society, both keeper of its darkest secrets and former site of a ‘grand yet lost’ civilization” (McPherson 17). Consider how Capote’s unusual name becomes another ingredient in his strange brew. The cross-cultural combination of the Spanish Capote with the North American Truman—a complication now bleached by Capote’s celebrity— 47 needed explanation in 1946, when one of his earliest reviews introduces us to “Truman Capote, the e being accented” (Brickell xiv). Two years later, The New York Times Book Review still finds it necessary to explain that “the final ‘e’ is sounded” (Baker 5). Capote, born Persons, was adopted by his Cuban stepfather; presumably Persons (or Capote with a silent e) would not have required explanation. The current presidency of Harry Truman (1945-53) and the “true man” enclosed in Truman further heightened this nominal strangeness, as Capote was neither manly nor presidential by the standards of the time. 14 The young, effeminate, and strange figure of Capote is thus crossed with a nominal hypermasculinity that caroms against the “hyperfeminized figure of the southern woman as discursive symbol for the region,” which itself rebounds against the aggression— coded masculine—of Capote’s effeminate display (McPherson 19). Add the queer tropes of artistry and authorship to this semiotic incoherence, and we see the attractive overcoding that lets Capote transgress without correction. Capote and Newton Arvin: A Secret Display The oscillation between the direct exposure of Capote’s gay specificity and broader queer readings can be seen in the photo-essay’s “secret” display of his romance with literary critic and professor Newton Arvin (fig. 3). 15 Capote and Arvin, by all accounts, were open about their relations at Yaddo. Even if they were closeted in front of Larsen—and Capote seems never to have been closeted—it seems impossible that their relations aren’t referenced in her essay. On pages 112 and 113, which face each other, the photos are sandwiched between 48 Fig. 3 LIFE 15 July 1946: 112-113. By Lisa Larsen. Clockwise from left: Arvin Types (left side), Arvin Types (right side); Capote in Tower; Arvin Makes Bed. ads, as if the photos are the white portion of the French flag, bisected by the binding edge (fig. 3). The top photo, which stretches across both pages, features Arvin: “In a mullioned bay of what was once the boudoir of Lady Katrina and is now a study for Yaddo authors, Newton Arvin props himself up on a long window seat with a portable typewriter on his knees.” Below this photo, on page 112, there is a picture of “bed-making, here demonstrated by Author Arvin.” The caption tells us, incorrectly, that this bed was in Lady Katrina’s boudoir; the bed, in fact, was in Arvin’s bedroom, and not “a study for 49 Yaddo authors.” 16 Directly across from the picture of Arvin’s bed-making is the picture of Capote in the Tower Room. Capote sits, strained and overwhelmed, as Arvin makes the bed: this proximity, coupled with the mentions of bed-making and boudoir, would indicate Arvin and Capote’s relationship to those who knew it first-hand or had heard it second-hand. Contemporary readers who were sensitive to homosexual possibility may have also inferred the relationship—and the insensitive probably still sensed something askew. Fig. 3 LIFE 15 July 1946: 112-113. By Lisa Larsen. Clockwise from left: Arvin Types (left side), Arvin Types (right side); Capote in Tower; Arvin Makes Bed. 50 Consider the same lay-out with Professor Arvin—a man of authority in his forties—and a nymphet. Would LIFE have allowed it? The difference between the diffuse-yet-easily-perceptible queerness of the photos—a queerness that opened a space of difference that could be utilized by viewers for a variety of purposes—and the specific-yet-shrouded suggestion of two men in a boudoir exemplifies how Capote’s photographs fluctuate between hidden gay specificity and open queer possibilities. Capote in LIFE, Again On June 2, 1947, seven months before his novel was published, Capote made his second national photographic appearance in another LIFE photoessay: “Young U.S. Writers: A Refreshing Group of Newcomers on the Literary Scene is Ready To Tackle Almost Anything.” Here, again, the caption positions Capote as both youthful and strange: “Esoteric, New Orleans-born Truman Capote, 22, writes haunting short stories.” Here, again, Capote dominates the visual field (fig. 4). Capote’s 9¾ by 9¾ inches portrait, almost a full page, is followed by four 4½ by 4½ inches photographs of novelists Jean Stafford, Thomas Heggen, Calder Willingham, and Elizabeth Fenwick. All photos are by Jerry Cook except for Jean Stafford’s, which was taken by Jean Speiser. These are followed by five photographs of six more novelists: four 2 by 2 inches portraits and one 2 by 4 inches double portrait. 17 The relative sizes impose a rubric of relative importance on the authors. Capote is king; Stafford, Heggen, Willingham, and Fenwick are dukes; and the other six authors are minor nobles. 51 Fig. 4. Capote at Tête-à-tête. By Jerry Cooke. LIFE 2 June 1947: 75. Both Cooke and Speiser structure the photos of Stafford (fig. 5), Heggen, Willingham (fig. 6), and Fenwick by the vocabulary of the film noir still, laden with high- contrast menace and overdetermined symbols meant to reverberate with their books. (The “third tier” novelists are set apart not only by size but by a lack of stylistic coherence.) Stafford, author of The Mountain Lion (1947), is pictured in profile with a caged mountain lion, also in profile, behind her (fig. 5). Heggen, who wrote “a satire on life aboard a cargo ship,” is photographed in front of a naval uniform; Willingham, who 52 wrote “a hard-boiled novel about the brutalizing effects of life in a Southern military academy,” is photographed with a saber, a cadet’s hat, and five mysterious aces hanging off a line (fig. 6); and Fenwick, who wrote a novel “dealing with family psychological conflict,” sits in sweater and pearls in front of a blown-up period etching of a proper Victorian family. These photos relate the authors to, but distinguish them from, their novels’ Fig. 5 Jean Stafford. By Jean Speiser. Fig. 6 Calder Willingham. By Jerry Cooke. Both photos LIFE 2 June 1947: 76. contents: Heggen doesn’t wear the naval gear, and Stafford doesn’t roar. Capote, by contrast, sits at a Victorian double tête-à-tête in a room cluttered with bric-a-brac, similar to Yaddo’s, but cheaper. What do his surroundings signify? Does their fussiness reflect Capote’s too-careful, -formal, and -mature dress, and read as effeminate—as gay? Capote’s head enters the picture frame of a still life of fruit behind him, a possibly allusion to fruitiness that rhymes with the skull-bursting marble from last year’s LIFE: 53 Capote as father to Athena has become Capote as cousin to Carmen Miranda. Still, there is a marked lack of clear allusion compared to the other photos. Why? 18 The answer is found in the nexus between the caption’s “esoteric” and the gay contents of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Cooke clearly knew his authors’ work—as seen in the mystery of the Willingham aces, which refers to the crooked gambling in his End as a Man (1947). Homosexuality plays a much more prominent part than cards in the novel, which as LIFE coyly reports was tried for (and vindicated of) obscenity. Whether one graduates and “ends as a man” depends on whether one survives the constant “cutting of one’s ass” by seniors or, if one is a particularly alcoholic senior cadet, whether one is tortured by a stormy romance with a wizened sophomore with a weak heart, “that dismal, depraved, unhealthy, and all-the-rest-of-it thing—a practicing homosexual” (Willingham 236). Even after the book endured multiple censors as its author adapted it into a play (1953) and then a screenplay, the resulting movie, released as The Strange One (1957), still had appreciable gay content. 19 Cooke evades this content in Willingham’s photo by employing symbols from End as a Man that don’t indicate homosexuality. Why not do the same for Other Voices, Other Rooms? Any number of Southern Gothic details would have done nicely. True, the cluttered scene of Capote’s photo bears a vague resemblance to Skully’s Landing, the decaying mansion of his novel. Nonetheless, the setting of the photo is markedly less blunt than that of the other four, and its meaning remains esoteric. “Esoteric” in 1941 (as today) meant “designed for, and understood by, the specially initiated alone; not communicated, or not intelligible, to a general body of 54 followers.” 20 The photo caption’s “esoteric” thus indicates Capote’s otherness to those who understand its code: homosexuality as told through the fussy dandy. Stafford may be pictured with a mountain lion to indicate The Mountain Lion; Other Voices, Other Rooms, whose title itself participates in a dance of indirection around homosexuality (Other how?), cannot be indicated so easily. Cooke cannot show us a truck driver who wants to “take down [Capote’s] britches” (8). Nor can Cooke show us “two grown men standing in an ugly little room kissing each other” (43). If he wants to indicate the novel’s homosexuality, all he can show is Capote himself, who holds the unspeakable within his own body. Capote is his own iconography—and his body itself is a sign of homosexuality. 21 In the cultural lens, Capote is his own prop. Agency and Subversion This incorporation of the content of Other Voices, Other Rooms into Capote’s body is supported by his dominance of the essay: the celebrated body invites examination. Any reader could see that Capote was the essay’s star, with its first and biggest picture, though he was the only one of the eleven featured authors who hadn’t yet published a book. In the article that accompanies the photo-essay, the critic John Chamberlain barely acknowledges Capote—which was not a slight, but an appropriate gesture towards a writer of his low stature. Even Capote’s publisher, Bennett Cerf at Random House, was surprised by Capote’s domination of the photo-essay: About a week before Other Voices was published, my friend Richard Simon called me up and said, “How the hell do you get a full-page picture of an author in Life magazine before his first book comes out?” I said, “Do you think I’m going to tell you? Does Macy’s tell Gimbels?” Dick said, “Come on. How did you 55 wrangle that?” I said, “Dick, I have no intention of telling you. He hung up in a huff; and I hung up too, and cried, “For God’s sake, get me a copy of Life!” That was the first I knew about the whole affair! Truman had managed to promote that full-page picture for himself, and how he did it, I don’t know to this day. (224) We see here the limits of the houses’ ability to market books and authors as well as Capote’s own potency at self-advertisement—a potency Cerf exaggerates, as five months, not one week, pass before the book’s publication in December, 1947. But what is this potency? Can it be proven and measured? And did Capote control it? Did he have agency? In this particular instance, did he determine the content, form, and placement of his photos? Did Capote actively achieve his effects through careful art direction and the manipulation of people and institutions to put that art in play, or was he an unconscious cipher for what took place around his image? The range of possible agency slides from Larsen and Cooke controlling all aspects of Capote’s representation to Capote dictating his own representation. The actual agency was doubtlessly mixed, different for each shot and shoot, and compromised by editorial practice. Yet both peers and later critics credit Capote for his skills at publicity—with their back hand, as Capote’s power is usually softened as “charm” and sexualized as the ability to seduce the camera, or a reporter, or his publisher, Cerf: Well, that was a day when Truman arrived at Random House! He had bangs, and nobody could believe it when this young prodigy waltzed in. He looked about eighteen. He was bright and happy and absolutely self-assured. We said we wanted to publish anything he wrote…Phyllis [Mrs. Cerf] adopted Truman immediately. He was already exhibiting the charm which proved so irresistible that he soon became a society favorite. (223) Here Capote is trying to sell a novel of gay adolescence with explicit depictions of gay love and sex to the straight head of his desired house. Capote’s introduction to Random 56 House did not come by chance, but through the recommendation of McCullers and the buzz surrounding his stories, both very much supported by his deployment of a public persona as an effeminate prodigy. Capote clearly knew how to sell himself and his work—and we see how Cerf was sold. Cerf not only recognizes and names Capote’s charm but attributes Capote’s success to it, acknowledging both the public’s and his own (through the royal “we”) affection for Capote’s person. Cerf deflects Capote’s homosexuality through the usual triad: Capote is effeminate (his charm “waltzed in”), Capote is triply young (he is an “adoptable” “young” “prodigy”), and Capote is strange and excessive (“That was a day!”). It doesn’t matter what Capote writes, because the enchanted house “wanted to publish anything he wrote”—which allows Cerf to mention the success but not the content of Other Voices, Other Rooms in his memoir, although he almost always recollects the books he published in detail. Consider how, in his memoir, Cerf follows his recollection of Capote with his memories of Mary Jane Ward, author of The Snake Pit, a roman à clef of mental illness. Cerf writes: “The Snake Pit is the story of an intelligent girl of medium circumstances whose mind suddenly snaps and she has to be committed—which is what had happened to the author” (228). Cerf details both Ward’s mental illness and her fictional representation of this illness but shies away from Capote’s gay person and story. Insanity is bad, but homosexuality is unmentionable. Nonetheless, in a pattern that repeats in reviews of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Cerf ends his disquisition on Capote with his clearest reference to homosexuality yet, as if Cerf’s desire cannot be contained: 57 When Truman comes to the house, I am always delighted to see him, although he sometimes annoys me by throwing his arms around me and calling me “Great White Father” and “Big Daddy” and such. I say, “For Pete’s sake, cut that out.” But I don’t mind it somehow when Truman does it. (227) Capote and Cerf collaborate to allow Cerf to cover his desire with a young, effeminate, and strange mask that lets him say Y.E.S. to homosexual lust. Cerf may split off, contain, and safely engage with repressed fantasies by publishing Capote, just as Joel Knox gets a lift in exchange for holding Sam Radclif’s desire. Capote works the room to great effect—or does the room work him? Even before he was famous, Capote did not need to be present for his public persona to be used as a fantastic linchpin for what postwar U. S. Americans had repudiated. Consider one of Capote’s first notices, which anticipate his LIFE photos: The most remarkable new talent of the year was, in the opinion of the editor, that of Truman Capote, the e being accented, a young man from New Orleans just past his majority. It is safe to predict that Mr. Capote will take his place among the best short-story writers of the rising generation. (Brickell iii) Here are the usual three notes of Capote’s persona: his youth, his strangeness (via New Orleans, “most remarkable,” and the unusual e), and, to my ear, his effeminacy, through the coy construction of “just past his majority.” These assertions are factually true but carry other registers of meaning. Yes, Capote was young to achieve such success—but the excessive notation (“new talent,” “will take his place,” “rising generation,” “young,” and “just past his majority”) registers an otherness only tangentially connected to age. Capote’s youth becomes an easy channel through which to both express broad queerness and repress gay specificity: an umbilicus through which an intersubjective persona is pumped up with unspoken, and possibly unconscious, desire. 58 Capote’s potency came from his recognition that he was at the crux of several public discourses of queerness that referenced homosexuality indirectly. He pushed hard at that crux to excite the public even as the occluding overhang of these discourses shielded him from homophobia. Such shielding could be distasteful to those who confronted homophobia more directly. Calder Willingham opens a disapproving window on Capote in a 1948 letter: [Capote] tries too hard to be charming…[is] busy all the time at the job of getting ahead…also, he uses his homosexuality in this; he uses it as comedy, and plays the role of the effeminate buffoon, thus making people laugh at him. It gets attention. (Kaplan 276) Willingham wrote this letter to Gore Vidal, whose well-documented and frequently- expressed disgust for Capote suits Vidal’s attempt to separate the discourses of effeminacy, immaturity, and homosexuality in his own life and work—an effort that substantially harmed his literary career. Vidal viewed Capote’s reliance on this old- school crux as collaboration with the enemy, and he unfavorably compares Capote to writers such as himself whose post-war careers were damaged by homophobia: The only thing [about gay artists that straight critics] respect, that they put up with, is a freak like Capote, who has the mind of a Texas housewife, likes gossip, and gets all shuddery when she thinks about boys murdering people. (Mitzel 209) Yet Capote and Vidal were involved in the same project of challenging the hegemonic understanding of immaturity, effeminacy, and homosexuality—one fighting the devaluation, the other the conflation, of these different queernesses—and it’s symptomatic of the difficulty of fighting internalized as well as external homophobia that these writers expended energy attacking each other, show dogs performing tricks rather than attack dogs chewing at The Man. 59 Capote’s performance invokes Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, which holds that gender must be constantly performed to appear natural, and champions drag and other kinds of “gender performance [that] enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in a way that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire” (Gender 177). While Capote’s primary objective may not have been to force a wedge into the workings of the gender machine so as to reveal its nuts and bolts, but rather to redirect the machine’s energy to blow up his intersubjective persona, he did offer for public consumption a man who wasn’t defined by, but rather capitalized upon, his effeminacy and childishness. He tended to collaborate with photographers who had similar stakes in subverting straight male hegemony: women such as Larsen, who had to struggle against expectations to make art, or men who had sex with men, such as Cecil Beaton and Carl Van Vechten. These artists, by virtue of their marginal subject position, had conscious facilities and vested interest in and sensitivities to outlaw gender coding and its appeal—a possible explanation for Larsen’s focus on Capote. Capote’s subversion extends past the visual: his writing violently attacks masculine hegemony, so much so that his effeminacy and infantilism can be seen as ways to both split off and offer a visa to a considerable rage. When Vidal, referencing In Cold Blood (1966), accuses Capote of getting “all shuddery when she thinks about boys murdering people” (Mitzel 209), does Vidal pick up on Capote’s fear, or on Capote’s attraction to and identification with Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, who murder the stunningly normal Clutter family? The destruction of the social order extends through Capote’s work, from the disabling of the patriarch and the confirmation of homosexuality 60 in his son in Other Voices to the desecration of the upper class in Answered Prayers (1987), which makes “the beautiful people” ugly. Capote’s persona is a wily ambassador who smuggles these textual weapons of destruction into mass consciousness as the persona itself acts as a glamorous terrorist against gender security. Other Voices in Contemporary Mass Media The postwar need for such an intersubjective persona as an indirect means to discuss and process homosexuality can be seen in critical discussions of Other Voices, Other Rooms, a novel better read than synopsized and best understood as a psychosexual allegory of gay adolescence. As the novel opens, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, whose mother has recently died, is summoned to Skully’s Landing, the home of Ed Sansom, Joel’s father, whom Joel does not remember. Joel eventually learns that his father is bedridden and can only communicate by throwing a rubber ball; Joel was actually summoned by his stepmother’s cross-dressing cousin Randolph, who had shot the senior Sansom at the climax of a love pentagon which pivoted around a boxer whom Sansom managed and whom both Randolph and Randolph’s girlfriend desired. After the shooting, Randolph had Sansom marry Randolph’s cousin, nurse manqué Amy Skully, and all three repaired to her Southern Gothic estate. Joel’s discovery of this family plot—as well as his introduction to puberty— takes place against the backdrop of his friendships with the butch/femme twins Idabel and Florabel, and with Zooey, the family servant who yearns to escape the Landing but must care for her centenarian father. Joel’s flirtation with tomboy Idabel climaxes in a 61 romantic triangle with the dwarf Miss Wisteria, who is erotically infatuated with Joel, as Idabel is with Miss Wisteria. These burgeoning sexualities overwhelm Joel, who has a nervous collapse. Joel is nursed back to health by Randolph, and the novel ends with what seems to be an erotic agreement between the two as Joel prepares to directly encounter Randolph in drag for the first time, an encounter which the novel explicitly states makes him a man: She [Randolph] beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating, he paused only at the garden’s edge where, as though he’d forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind. (142) 22 From our contemporary perspective, it’s difficult to see how this novel could be discussed without the overt mention of homosexuality. There are two explicit descriptions of homosexual acts in the novel, and many of its characters have specifically homosexual desires or manifest transgendered traits, which would have been read as homosexual at a time when effeminacy was conflated with same-sex desire. Nonetheless, the novel’s poetic style and the narrator’s young age allowed almost all of Capote’s reviews to mention homosexuality slightly if at all, though coded references abound. 23 TIME begins the unsigned “Spare the Laurels” with “The author of this novel is only 23, but his literary promise has already caused a flutter in Manhattan publishing circles” (102). The effeminate connotations of flutter are followed by other indirect yet unmistakable allusions to the mid-century construction of homosexuality, such as the description of “the languid and effeminate Cousin Randolph…who drinks sherry, calls [Knox] ‘darling,’ and holds his hand.” TIME understands the text itself as gay; the novel is “immature and its theme is calculated to make the flesh crawl”—a description of the 62 contemporary understanding of homosexuality as a morbid arrest of psychosexual development. The review must move through these euphemisms before it can actually say “homosexual”: Connotation becomes denotation as the review climaxes and closes with “But for all [Capote’s] novel’s gifted invention and imagery, the distasteful trappings of its homosexual themes overhang it like Spanish moss.” The complication and difficulty of public expressions of homosexuality are elaborated in the letters column of the next issue of TIME. In an interchange titled “Mossy Trappings,” R. E. Berg protests: You seem to advocate tolerance for the customary things discriminated against: race, color, creed, religion, etc. However, I do not believe you have ever made a reference to homosexuality (a perfectly legitimate psychological condition) without going specifically out of your way to make a vicious insinuation, caustic remark, or ‘dirty dig’” (8-9). After reprising the close of TIME’s review, Berg himself closes: “I have seen a great deal of Spanish moss in a lot of places…and I must confess that some of it is quite beautiful…” (ellipses Berg’s). Below Berg’s positive revision of the moss metaphor, the editor responds, “It gives TIME the creeps.” TIME thus allows not only a naming but through Berg a defense of homosexuality, albeit surrounded by dismissal and disgust. TIME here illustrates Foucault’s concept of reverse discourse (1978)—of how disapproval and censorship can lead not only to the coalescence of identity around what is censored but to “unanticipated responses and counterrepresentations, unforeseen pictures of difference and self-conscious stagings of deviance” (R. Meyer 10). TIME’s inconsistent representation of homosexuality is writ large by its dispassionate review of Kinsey, written less than a month before: “As a result of the tabulated testimony, Kinsey 63 concludes…37% [of the U.S. male population] has some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age, with the highest rate among single males 36 to 40” (166). TIME, matter-of-fact with Kinsey and tortured-if-finally-expressive with Capote, refused to review Vidal’s The City and the Pillar altogether, despite its sales and its author’s prominence. These inconsistent and incoherent presentations and understandings of homosexuality are mirrored in claims that the novel itself is incoherent and obscure. There is a contrary correspondence between perceptions of the books’ aesthetic merits— specifically realist aesthetic merits—and the direct mention of homosexuality. If the novel is named as gay, it can’t be good. Nor can it be realist, for homosexuality indicates a novel whose content is somehow especially “artificial”: inferior to the “real” and compounded by textual obscurity. The novel’s obscurity/difficulty/artificiality is chiefly situated in Joel Knox. In “Books of the Times,” Prescott relates how In the course of the summer and after some very queer experiences indeed Joel is supposed to have crossed the invisible line dividing childhood from the first manifestations of maturity. But Joel’s psychological growth is not clear enough to be convincing because Joel is never a flesh-and-blood boy” (23) Is it that Joel is never bodily realized, or is that body homosexual, which is incommensurate with the review’s otherwise positive reading of the novel and thus must be censored? All Capote’s reviews struggle with the concept of a gay coming-of-age novel, which follows the maturation of a specifically gay boy into specifically gay manhood— something for which there were no words at the time, and few now. Fifty years after Other Voices was published, the psychoanalytic theorist Ken Corbett wrote: 64 There is no homosexual boyhood. That is, there is no conceptual category called ‘homosexual boyhood’.…within our culture, there is sufficient anxiety and resistance to the possibility of a proto-gay subjectivity that one is discouraged from even imagining (much less attempting to document) such subjectivities (“Cross-Gendered” 352). Other Voices charts and gives voice to subjectivities not yet culturally intelligible, and the media’s sloppy elision of the gay content of Other Voices, Other Rooms was also the messy transmittal of what was repressed—that the novel is a “insurrection at the level of ontology, a critical opening up of the questions, What is real? Whose lives are real? How might reality be remade?” (Butler “Violence” 22). Gay readers who were schooled at reading the shadow of the homosexual other as it fell across mass culture could abstract the specifically gay from the broadly queer references of Other Voices’ reviews. The novel’s demand for the recognition of what had not been previously seen as human was doubled by Capote’s author’s photo, which repeated in visual form the novel’s assertion of an unspeakable subjectivity: the gay self. The Author Photo for Other Voices, Other Rooms In the author photo for Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote, photographed at his direction by his friend Howard Halma, reclines on a Victorian sofa or fainting couch, his head turned toward and staring at the viewer from a close distance that implies intimacy (fig. 7). Capote’s head, on the photo’s right, is balanced to the left by the seat roll’s scroll, a visual parallel that cements his connection to the couch. The intimate 65 Fig. 7: Truman Capote. Author’s photo for Other Voices, Other Rooms. By Howard Halma connotations of reclining on upholstery—Does the model sleep or rise from sleep, and does the viewer observe the unguarded? Does the model entice the viewer to bed?—are traditionally feminine, so much so that a species of couch, the recamier, takes its name from David’s 1800 painting of a woman of the same name. 24 Capote, however, in his disruptive translation of this traditional vocabulary of seduction, can best be compared to Manet’s Olympia (fig. 8). In The Painting of Modern Life (1984), T. J. Clark analyzes the inability of Manet’s contemporary critics to discuss Olympia as follows: critics saw “some kind of indeterminacy in the image: a body on a bed, evidently sexed and sexual, but whose appearance was hard to make out in any steady way, and harder still to write about” (96). 66 Fig. 8: Olympia. By Edouard Manet, 1863. Musée d’Orsay. Olympia disturbed because she refused the codes of representation for prostitution, thrusting an awareness of her own subjectivity upon a society whose usual view of prostitutes was flat. Olympia’s subjectivity not only prevents her from being read solely as an object of desire but also forces upon the viewer an awareness of both the artificiality of her pose and the viewer’s expectations of such a pose. Instead of regarding Olympia, the viewer regards his or her own desire, and how that desire is culturally shaped. Whether or not Capote and Halma were conscious of the specifics of their photograph’s art-historical antecedents is unknown, and in many respects, unimportant. Halma was Capote’s roommate, rather than a professional photographer, and Gerard Clarke, Capote’s official and most reliable biographer, notes only that the men created 67 the photograph together. Capote—typically—had a variety of origin stories about the photograph, and often refused responsibility for either the pose or the choice of the photograph as a publicity photo. What is known is that Capote insisted on this using this photo for the dust jacket of Other Voices, and what is important for our purposes is that he knew that he would provoke a reaction by representing himself through a pose that was strongly associated with feminine seduction. Like Olympia, the photographed Capote quotes the conventions of the odalisque as he refutes them, provoking a desire that overflows artistic and cultural conventions, and disturbs as it entices. Capote offers a mirror image of Olympia—he leans to his photograph’s right, while she leans to her picture’s left, and her tied bow is now his bow tie—but the far hand against the genitals still indicates an unexpected, discomfiting potency, and the viewer’s erotic consternation is the same. 25 As Capote cannot publicly present himself naked on a bed (or on a bed at all), he presents himself as a clothed nude. 26 In a trick practiced in LIFE, Capote decontextualizes his clothes and forces their re-reading. His white long-sleeved shirt, buttoned tattersall vest, and bowtie, when combined with his informal and untraditionally-masculine pose, are stripped of their usual connotations of conservative, formal, adult masculinity to shimmer with indeterminacy; their fussy propriety, like the couch’s Victoriana, becomes appropriate for fantasy and play. Conformity becomes travesty, and Capote’s clothes a state of undress. The photo’s staginess and strangeness are referenced and focused by the glasses that Capote holds in his hand, glasses that reverberate with the staid-unto-celibate connotations of his bowtie. The librarian has 68 taken off her glasses and revealed her beauty—and holds on to them so the remembered contrast may heighten the revelation of her face. Capote’s direct gaze—which doubles the in-your-face, “masculine” dare of publicly presenting the photo—is contradicted by the effeminacy of the glossy lips, the overtly carefully-styled hair and eyebrows, and the recumbent pose. Hilton Als sees here “an assertion, a point, asserting this: I am a woman” (95). Capote was not transsexual, but he did adapt the masquerade of femininity to signal his availability for fantasy and the propriety of his objectification. Feminist theory has long exposed the prison of being the “bearer, not maker, of meaning”—but for a gay man in 1947, to be viewed in the mass media as “an American woman of style…something to be fucked somehow” was to bear an unusually attractive meaning (Mulvey 433; Als 96). And then Capote was a man, if a queer man, and had some access to masculine privilege—as his gaze reminds us. Capote, like Olympia, maintains his own subjectivity as he offers himself up for interpersonal transaction—a tension which confuses his viewers and adds to his value and appeal. For Capote, like Olympia, is for sale. Capote’s book wears his body as an enticement; those who buy his novel may take his picture home. This queer prostitution is traditional. Ever since authors have sold their works—and by association, themselves—in the marketplace, their genders have been rendered incoherent by normative codes for both men and women. 27 Male writers—especially those like Capote noted for their attention to detail, both in terms of style and the characterization of women and children—have traditionally had to assert their masculinity against the “feminine” aspects of their craft. Capote’s young, effeminate, strangeness is a difference 69 of degree, not kind, and his pose adheres to the law, if not the letter, of the publishing system he troubles. Broadly Queer, Specifically Gay Capote’s success at selling himself is dependent upon the broadly queer as well as the specifically gay: upon those non-gay folk who may have identified with and/or desired Capote without sharing his sexuality. Photographer Halma tells how he overheard two middle-aged women studying one of the photo’s enlargements in a bookstore window. “I’m telling you, he’s just young,” said one. “And I’m telling you,” replied the other, “if he isn’t young, he’s dangerous!” (Clarke 158). This fantastic scene was so much repeated by Capote that Clarke suspects him or Halma of faking. True or not, the story illustrates the possible elasticity of Capote’s persona, and Capote’s pleasure at this multiplicity. His photo’s various indeterminacies allows the possibility of desire to flicker on and off for these women—a flickering that enhances desire. But for what? An underage, untraditionally manly object of their heterosexual lust? Or do the women themselves want to repeat Capote’s performance—to be seductively “bad.” Or are their desires and identifications interlaced? As in the LIFE photos, Capote’s constructed youth makes him more available for fantasy. The retaining walls of censorship and repression force the charged flood released by Capote’s swing between gender poles into the discourse of age—a slippage guided by Capote’s trick clothes, and by the photo’s caption by old friend Marguerite Young: “Rarely does one find a writer of Truman Capote’s generation who shows, at the 70 beginning of his career, those results which would seem to come only with maturity.” This blurb can be reduced to Capote’s precocity, or more precisely, his age’s instability: the age of his generation vs. the age of his career vs. the age of his “results,” results that correlate with the satisfaction provided by his sophisticated fiction. Capote is understood as a “boy” as he is understood as a “woman”—to force intelligibility upon what to these eyes is not a boy, or even a teen, but a sexually provocative gay man. That said, Capote’s jacket photo does literally enclose his boy hero—and readers’ tendency to identify authors with their protagonists was abetted by Random House, who used the photo in print ads that read “This Is Truman Capote” and sent huge blow-ups to bookstores. The New York Times Book Review was typical in reading the novel as autobiography: “The story of Joel Knox did not need to be told, except to get it out of the author’s system” (Baker 4). Now, presumably, the “boy” could properly develop. Yet Capote’s photo offers a vision of development unfit for the Times, for the narrated Knox never actively strikes a pose of seduction. Instead, Knox—covertly coveted by Radclif and overtly desired by Cousin Randolph, Florabel, and the dwarf Miss Wisteria— inflames desire through cluelessness. Knox sees neither the sexual desire he provokes in others nor his own sexual desire, which increases his girth as a container of both his own and others’ lust. He is properly named after Nox, the god of night, whose temporal domain hosts darkness and sex. Throughout the novel, Knox not only resists but is sickened by sexual knowledge, which culminates in his breakdown when Cousin Randolph and Miss Wisteria’s desires overwhelm him; Knox’s recognition of sexuality ends the book, as if the novel cannot 71 contain a Knox who knows. If the novel is a claim for the humanity of gay boyhood, the photo is a picture of a nascent Knox realized by this narrative of maturity: a sexually fantastic “boy.” Capote as Seen by Gay Contemporaries The capacity to easily read the photo’s mysteries may have lessened its charm for gay men already secure in their sexual identity and worldly success. Cecil Beaton, who himself contributed to Capote’s young, effeminate, and strange construction by photographing him against a garden wall festooned with roses (1948) and as a half-naked, be-turbaned princeling with a long cigarette holder (1949), writes in 1957 that “Truman Capote, then barely in his twenties, appeared on [his] dust jacket looking somewhat like a wombat and peering out from under a flaxen fringe” (35). The musician and diarist Ned Rorem, writing in 1984, similarly mocks “the author gazing at us, doe-eyed ‘neath yam- colored China-doll bangs, from a prone pose on a Victorian settee” (150). Both note particulars of Capote’s hair color that can’t be seen in black and white: extraneous knowledge is invoked to mock the photo and its subject. Similarly, Capote does not sport a china-bowl cut (though he sometimes did); is firmly in his twenties; and is neither doe- eyed nor a small marsupial, animal metaphors which both recognize and diminish the photo’s “animal” sexuality. These sour retrospectives show how the photo was so closely identified with Capote that its representation stretched past its physical limits—and the descriptions’ nastiness may respond to the photo’s profound impact upon Capote’s queer contemporaries. Andy Warhol offers one of the clearest examples of this impact. 72 Warhol was only three years younger than Capote, though Capote’s precociousness left him famous while Warhol was still in art school. When Warhol first saw a blow-up of the Other Voices photo in the office of Theater Arts magazine, he convinced the staff to let him take it home. He then wrote Capote fan letters, sent him watercolors, stalked his building, and initiated a friendship with his mother. Warhol’s obsession extended to his art: his first gallery exhibition was 1952’s 15 Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote, and the first reproduction of his non-commercial art in the mass media was a 1957 photo-essay in LIFE of shoes painted in gold leaf, decorated with golf and silver trim, and named after celebrities: “Truman Capote” as flower-filled slipper. 28 Warhol’s obsession affected his demeanor: a contemporary describes him as sounding “as if he had written his own part in a play by Truman Capote”—which indicates how “Capote” was shorthand for a whole school of self- dramatization (Bockris 53). That Warhol was one of many gay men who worshipped Capote as a queer icon is proven by the art press: a 1954 review in Art Digest tags Warhol as one of those “attractive and demanding young men involved in the business of being as much like Truman Capote or his heroes as possible” (Guest 1954). Warhol’s biggest homage, however, was that he too used his homosexuality as an integral part of the public persona that brought him fame. He may have traded in immaturity and effeminacy for developmental disability and asexuality as broad registers of queerness, but the purposeful stoking of notoriety through strangeness was the same. 29 73 Capote in TIME The media, which could barely discuss the novel’s contents, was happy to report, and so heighten (but not discuss!) the novel’s visual sensation. For example, TIME’s negative review in January was followed by two more pieces on the photo— extraordinary coverage for a dust jacket. These pieces are in the People section rather than the book review; Capote’s persona had grown past the book that displayed it. On March 15, TIME reports how Merle Miller, novelist and editor of Harper’s, took pained exception to a ripely precious publicity photograph of a pensive, reclining Capote peering up through artfully disarranged bangs. If the idea of printing that particular photograph was Capote’s, Miller fumed, it was ‘deplorable; if his publisher’s, disgraceful.’ (44) 30 What, precisely, was wrong with the photo? TIME need not say because its readers already know: Capote’s confident use of erotic strangeness to visually tout his book. In TIME’s report of Miller’s protest—a protest that offered Capote yet more publicity—we see again how the tensions between fascination and disgust, and repression and advertisement, propelled Capote’s persona into and then sustained its celebrity. Five weeks later, on May 3, TIME not only discusses but reproduces “the languid pose of precocious Author Truman Capote” in a rare discussion of an author’s photo per se (86). The photo’s caption disrespects both “this dank bestseller with a homosexual theme” and its use of Capote’s photo as a marketing tool—“Without such shrewdly posed pictures as these, the publishing business…[might] be reduced to selling books on their merits”—but the photo’s reproduction celebrates Capote visually as it denigrates him literally. TIME reproduces the photo to report another simultaneous celebration and denigration: the author’s photo of Max Shulman’s Economy Size (1948) (fig 9). 74 Fig. 9: Max Shulman. By Mina Turner. TIME 3 May 1948: 86. Shulman’s parody is attributed to his publisher rather than the man or his photographer: “To poke fun at Random House, Doubleday and Co, dressed he-man humorist Max Shulman in a checked weskit, also posed him sitting on his neck [sic].” 31 Both authors are denied agency for their photos—which makes the photos’ commentaries on masculinity less threatening and secures them in the normative arena of corporate play. Burly, mature, “he-man” Shulman, photographed by Mina Turner, takes up Capote’s pose to mock him. 32 Shulman’s awkwardness is meant to showcase the perversity of Capote’s studied grace, as underscored by TIME’s caption, which describes Shulman as “sitting on his neck”—a term that correctly states that Shulman’s neck, rather than his back, rests against the sofa, but that mocks the recumbent pose through its abrupt informality. Despite Shulman’s claim to appropriate masculinity, he diligently avoids his penis. While Capote lets his far arm trail over his side to rest naturally on his genitalia, Shulman awkwardly bends his arm so as to avoid his genitals. Shulman further fends off 75 his genitals by balling his left hand where Capote drapes his fingers—a defensive fist that furthers the gap between performative masculinity and the penis. Shulman’s manhood is further gouged by his couch. While Capote is visually integrated with his furniture, Shulman’s couch ascends out of the frame, dwarfing him and making him incidental. Shulman may purposefully fail at the photograph’s tropes, but the satire, especially placed next to Capote’s mastery, rebounds and places his own masculinity in question. As Shulman’s manly gut turns to pendulous flab, so control of the pose slips through his clenched fingers. Shulman’s careful study extends to his jacket copy, a false blurb that parodies Marguerite Young’s excessive statement of Capote’s youth: “Although these three books were written by Shulman at the age of eight, critics have pointed out that they show the insight and penetration of a man of nine” (109). The detail of this satire, which was attributed to a whole house, proves the depth of other writers’ and publishers’ consideration of Capote’s success. And the joke’s accessibility to the readership of a “he-man humorist,” a readership not easily conflated with Capote’s, tells of the photo’s phenomenal spread through public consciousness. Sam Radclif has highlighted his hair with “pure yellow strands” to make fun of Joel Knox; now it’s the trucker, instead of the queer boy, who needs a lift. Conclusion: “The Winnah!” And so Capote got his ride. Mano a mano, he wins: His spectacular triumph marks him as an author worthy of visual representation. This champ won his title not 76 only in spite of, but also because of, his differences from hegemonic masculinity. He thus brought the gender system into relief and question, through both through his persona and his writing, without suffering the usual price. At least for a time. Ken Corbett cautions: Queer theorists have had much to say about the oppression of regulatory force and the dulling consequences of normativity. But what of the strain of living outside the regular, the reliable, the customary? What does it cost to be always and already fabulous? (“More Life,” 321) Capote’s celebrity would eventually eclipse his artistic reputation and encase him in the static persona of an alcoholic society gossip. By the time of his death in 1984, this sad end had obscured, but does not detract from, the fabulous potency of his early portraits. 77 Endnotes for Chapter 1 1 Cf. Coontz for the destabilization in gender roles brought about by WWII, and the restabilization through repression that followed. Cf. D’Emilio for the relationship between WWII and the emergence of an urban gay subculture, and how gays and lesbians dealt with the “return to traditional values” in the 50s that outstripped the conservativism in place before WWII. 2 Cf. Lewes for an exhaustive overview of mid-century psychoanalytic theories of male homosexuality. Also see Abelove, Chapter 1. 3 Reviews were mixed for Vidal’s second novel, Under a Yellow Wood (1947), the story of a young man’s unhappy return to domestic life after a tumultuous European affair. Nonetheless, Vidal was still viewed as a promising novelist before the publication of The City and the Pillar (1948). 4 From 1950-1954, Vidal also wrote novels under the pseudonyms Katherine Everard, Cameron Kay, and most successfully, Edgar Box, under whose name he wrote the murder mysteries Death before Bedtime (1952), Death in the Fifth Position (1953), and Death Likes It Hot (1954). These novels were intended to be read less seriously than the novels under his name. It’s likely, however, that at part of the appeal of using pseudonyms for Vidal was that they allowed him to avoid the blacklist he’d been under since The City and the Pillar. 5 Little has been written on Larsen (1925-59), whose career was cut short by breast cancer. One of the few female staff photographers at LIFE in the late 40s and 50s, and best known for her portraits and overseas photojournalism, Larsen was included in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art in 1950, 51, 55, and 58, and had a solo show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1957. See Loengard 2001. 6 Capote’s other publications in 1945 were “A Tree of Night” in Mademoiselle and “Jug of Silver” in Harper’s Bazaar. These publications in women’s magazines were gendered, but not in the same way that they would be now, as both magazines were then regular homes for serious, even avant-garde artists and writers. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of fiction in women’s magazines. 7 For Capote’s biography, see Clarke (1988), Grobel (1985), and Plimpton (1997). 8 McCullers and Capote’s friendship would soon sour. For McCullers’s biography, see Carr (1975). 9 Black loafers and white socks were also associated at mid-century with the dancer and actor Gene Kelly, who worked to change the public image of male dancers as masculine 78 and athletic rather than effeminate and graceful. If Capote seemed less childish in the rest of the photo, these connotations might take hold. 10 Other photographs from this session, now at the Beinecke Library, show a younger, more conventionally feminine Young of a higher social class. Larsen seems to have manipulated Young’s self-presentation considerably more than Capote’s. 11 Cf. Miller: Consider how the two semantically opposed, morphologically identical words, effeminate and emasculate (in French efféminé and émasculé), instead of together defining a state of genderlessness, synonymously converge in a single attribute that may be predicated only of men. (15) 12 Cf. Gunderson 7. 13 Cf. Connell, Hegemonic Masculinity: Gayness, in patriarchal ideology, is the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity, the items ranging from fastidious taste in home decoration to receptive anal pleasure. Hence, from the point of view of hegemonic masculinity, gayness is easily assimilated to femininity. (78) 14 The name Capote’s connotations of the masculine, the foreign, and the potent is furthered by capote anglaise, French for condom. 15 Arvin endured a more definite public exposure when his 1960 prosecution for harboring homosexual pornography became national news. Cf. Werth. 16 Cf. Werth 101. Also note that Capote’s room (the Tower Room) was directly up the stairs from Arvin’s bedroom (Lady Katrina’s boudoir). 17 Gore Vidal is one of these tertiary authors, and the difference between Cooke’s photos of Vidal and Capote, born within a year and similarly gay-identified, is striking. Vidal presents himself as neither young, effeminate, nor strange in his manly headshot. The other photographers are Lisa Larsen, Joe Schussel, and Loran F. Smith. 18 There is some evidence that this room is Capote’s own. Capote was often photographed at home, and one could read here a conflation of two visual tropes: of the male homosexual subject with domestic space, marked as womanly and thus here effeminate, and of the tradition of photographing the professional at his workplace, here the home. These readings are foreclosed, however, by the following quartet of photos that strongly associate the author with the contents of his or her art. 79 19 Willingham stayed in Hollywood and is best known today for the screenplay of The Graduate (1967), which he co-wrote with Buck Henry. Cf. Russo for the gay content of The Strange One. 20 Cf. Webster’s, 1939 edition. Whenever possible, I have used dictionaries and encyclopedias that were contemporary to the subject at hand. 21 This conflation is easier to make with Capote than with Willingham, who unlike Capote, did not publicly identify as gay, just as the hero of Willingham’s novel, unlike Joel Knox, does not embrace homosexual desire. 22 Seil (2000) reads Other Voices as a novel of a specifically transsexual adolescence, and its climax as Joel’s—and Capote’s—embrace of his female nature. I read Randolph’s drag, and Joel’s embrace of it, as dictated by a gender dialectic that leaves “feminine” expression the only legible expression of non-straight masculinity—though I do read other characters as transsexual. These distinctions are exceedingly hard to make when queer specificities are obscured by misogyny and homophobia. 23 Of Capote’s national reviews—in Library Journal, The New York Times (Prescott), The New York Times Book Review (Baker), The New York Times Herald Review (Morris), Newsweek, Partisan Review (Hardwick), and TIME, all in 1948—only Newsweek straightforwardly states that “this is the story of a young boy and his growth into a homosexual” (91). 24 A reclining Jeanne Recamier was also painted by Gerard (1802). The distinctions between the recamier, the fainting couch, the divan, the sofa, the settee, and the chaise lounge, are both precise and often conflated under the catch-all of couch. Relevant to our purposes is the constant feminine connotation of lying recumbent upon a couch of any guise. 25 As Halma’s photo of Capote is s a mirror image of Olympia, so Olympia is a mirror image of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, which, too, caused a scandal due to its flouting of contemporary conventions of depicting sexuality. 26 Neither can Capote have a maid, the black presence at the heart of Manet’s painting. But Capote’s exotic persona does rhyme with the painting’s interplay of race, sexuality, and gender, as the Southern gentleman’s masculinity is always compromised by his aristocratic sensibility, his intimacy with black men and women, and the memory of Southern defeat. 27 Cf. Gallagher and Glazener. 28 Cf. Coplans. 80 29 Cf. Koestenbaum, and R. Meyer. 30 Miller and Capote published their first novels in the same season—Elizabeth Hardwick reviewed (and panned) both together in Partisan Review —and Capote’s greater success may have powered Miller’s anger. Hardwick’s review is discussed in Chapter 2. In 1971, Miller would write On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual, and a repudiated identification with Capote may also have affected his reaction to the photo. 31 Shulman was a popular humorist who is best known today for The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis and The Tender Trap (1951, 55). Both novels were filmed under his supervision (1953, 1955), and the first inspired a popular television series (1959-1963). Shulman’s name is frequently misspelled Schulman. 32 Who is Mina Turner? My best guess: The granddaughter of photographer Gertrude Kasebier (1852-1934), who worked in her grandmother’s studio and bequeathed much of Kasebier’s work to museums. Turner’s nephew cannot confirm this provenance, however. 81 Chapter 2: Capote, Forster, and the Trillings Homophobia and Literary Culture at Mid-Century Strangers on a Train In a reminiscence published in George Plimpton’s oral history of Truman Capote (1997), Diana Trilling discusses her and her husband Lionel’s first meeting with Capote, almost certainly in August, 1946, two years before Capote published his first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms. That August, Capote was a twenty-one-year-old writer who had published several well-received stories (among them “Miriam” and “A Tree of Night”) and had just been featured in a photoessay on the Yaddo arts colony in the July 15, 1946 issue of LIFE (Larsen). 1 This promising start could have been appreciably helped or hindered by either of the Trillings, who were a power couple of their day. Both were prominent members of the New York Intellectuals, the cosmopolitan group of cultural and political writers who—broadly speaking—were born poor and Jewish, became active in the anti-Stalinist Old Left as college students in the 1930s, and set the tone and subject of much of the intellectual discussion of the 1940s and 50s. 2 Diana Trilling had written a weekly book review column in the Nation since 1941; would come to write for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Saturday Review, and Partisan Review; and would continue to publish into the 1990s. She was always best known, however, as the wife of Lionel Trilling, literary critic, fiction writer, and professor at Columbia University. By 1947, L. Trilling had published book-length studies on Matthew Arnold (1939) and E. M. Forster (1943), as well as several of the essays that 82 would be collected in the influential The Liberal Imagination (1950), which established him as a public intellectual in the mold of George Orwell and Edmund Wilson. Diana Trilling tells how Capote introduced himself in Grand Central Station (Lionel had gone to buy tickets); Capote recognized her from a photograph in the home of his friend Leo Lerman (70). 3 The three sat together on the train. Here was this little creature, odd-looking and with his extraordinary squeaky voice, very high-pitched and very resonant: it carried the length of the car. So he sat opposite Lionel and me and proceeded to ask questions about Lionel’s book on E.M. Forster. Truman wanted to know why it was that Lionel had ignored Forster’s homosexuality. Now this was not only a bold question to put at the top of his shrill voice in a very crowded car in those days [sic]. I remember having very mixed feelings. One: wishing he would shut up and go away, because I was embarrassed and I thought there was going to be a lynching in the car. I was afraid people would do something. I could see that they were uncomfortable, angry at him, very angry. Truman wasn’t watching or if he was he didn’t let on. But the other thing was that I was extraordinarily impressed by him….It was a very impressive first view. He asked Lionel the question very directly: “Why did you not treat Forster’s homosexuality in the book?” “I didn’t know about it.” Truman said, “Well, didn’t you hear about it?” “No,” said Lionel. “I had not heard about it. I know nothing about his life.” Truman said, “Well, didn’t you guess it?” Lionel said, “Yes, as I was writing my book, it began to dawn on me that probably he was homosexual.” “Then why didn’t you write about it?” “Because it didn’t seem to concern me very much. I wasn’t very interested in it.” Truman simply thought that was impossible. Lionel said that it was exactly possible. (Plimpton 70, italics D. Trilling) This oral history is the fullest account of Capote’s encounter with the Trillings in print. Diana Trilling’s fascination with Capote, Capote’s with Lionel Trilling, and L. Trilling’s dismissal of Capote are also referenced in D. Trilling’s memoir, and in two letters by 83 Capote, written shortly after his trip. L. Trilling continued his dismissal of Capote by leaving no record of the incident. These various records (and lack of record) offer different perspectives on a clash among three individuals from different textual traditions who resisted the social order in very different ways. First, the “Man of Culture” whose acclaim for his explication of liberal humanism made him the first Jew afforded tenure in the notably anti-semitic English department of Columbia University. 4 Second, the “Faithful Wife” who insisted on subordinating herself to her husband yet aggressively situated her intellectual production on the masculine side of the various gendered binaries operating in the publishing world and literary culture of her time. Last, the “Homosexual Writer” who from the feminine side of those binaries successfully turned his own homosexuality into a marketable good at a time when assertions of homosexuality outside of private contexts were met with censorship, derision, and oppression. All three believed that literature could and should challenge the dominant ideology, especially on behalf of the individual, yet each reached a different reckoning of how this challenge might be met and to what end. All three personally resisted social hegemony, but in three distinct registers: ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. And all three cannot be easily reduced to one school or philosophy, and are known for the subtle gradations and self-conscious contradictions of their work. The mingled sympathy and antipathy of these literary players made them interesting to each other and fueled their conflict on the train. My goal in this chapter is to use reactions to Capote’s persona and work by Diana and Leonard Trilling, and to a lesser extent, by two other mid-century critics, Leslie 84 Fiedler and Elizabeth Hardwick, as an exemplar of the complex relations between literary culture and homophobia at mid-century. What exactly happens when Capote forces the Trillings’ attention to a blind spot of liberal humanism: the exclusion of issues of gender and sexuality from serious consideration? I will show that when Capote confronts the Trillings on the train, he attacks their identity as literary and social critics committed to the belief that literature can and should be a tool for social justice, capable of questioning both their own and their society’s preconceptions, and sensitive to prejudice and minority discrimination by virtue of their heritage, and in Diana’s case, her gender. The battle is waged on the Trillings’ home ground—the field of rigorous close reading and the ethical responsibility of the literary critic—but the Trillings find themselves resisting rather than promoting basic principles of liberal humanism. The skirmish offers an object lesson in how homophobia was negotiated by the liberal intelligentsia: how it was performed, how it was leavened by gender, and how a false reconciliation with humanist ideology was psychologically managed. While the homophobia of the New York Intellectuals and the New Critics is received wisdom, its particulars are not. In the coming decades, some of these critics would temper their views precisely because outspoken figures like Capote forced a confrontation. By articulating how challenges to homophobia percolated though literary culture, we may see the beginnings of the cultural change spurred by individual encounters, as well as by more collective acts of protest. In addition, I wish to complicate the charges of presentism often used to defend these critics—a dismissal made specious by Capote’s challenge on the train. Certainly the constraints under which 85 earlier generations wrote should not be forgotten. Yet if Capote, in 1948, may accuse Lionel Trilling of being a poor critic due to his studied ignorance of homosexuality, we may do the same. Furthermore, if Diana Trilling and other mid-century critics chose to discuss Capote’s sexuality, it is certainly appropriate to examine how. A secondary aim of this chapter is to question the current standing of Capote in current literary, gay, lesbian, and queer studies. When I offer Capote as a forerunner of the Gay and Lesbian Rights movements, I contradict the standard reading of Capote as a careerist, apolitical aesthete and celebrity qua celebrity. The politics and political impact of Capote as a bestselling, critically respected, and openly gay author who frequently wrote about homosexuality throughout his career have been neglected. Consider the only two anthologies of Capote criticism, the Waldmeirs’ The Critical Response to Truman Capote (1999) and the Truman Capote volume of Harold Bloom’s series of “Modern Critical Views” (2003), which both consistently reference Capote’s flamboyant celebrity but contain only a few speculations on his political intent and impact, by Peter Christensen in the Waldemeir anthology. 5 In addition, Capote criticism in general greatly favors In Cold Blood (1958), the hard-boiled creative non-fiction about the murderers of a prototypical Midwestern family which was Capote’s biggest seller and his last complete extended narrative. 6 More than half of the articles in Bloom’s anthology are concerned with In Cold Blood; the Waldemeir is more balanced but still favors Blood. The recent biographical films Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006) share with the anthologies a preoccupation with both Capote’s celebrity and Blood. For their dramatic tension, both films rely upon the contrast between Capote’s flamboyant effeminacy and his butch 86 narration of manly killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, which both films resolve through Capote’s exploitation-cum-friendship-cum-romance of both the killers and his assistant, the writer Harper Lee. The films therefore both get to “celebrate” Capote and to portray him in the homophobic tradition that finds him a manipulative exploiter of both troubled working-class straight men and devoted women—a stereotypical assessment which in this instance is probably valid, if reductive. Yet In Cold Blood is atypical of Capote’s work in having a homosexual subtext rather than overt gay concerns. What is commonly called Capote’s “early” writing but is actually the majority of his completed work—the novels Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), The Grass Harp (1951) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), and the “early” short stories, most collected in A Tree of Night (1949)—frequently include overtly homosexual characters and homosexual themes. As director Blake Edwards removed the homosexuality and augmented the manliness of the narrator of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in the 1961 film adaptation, so literary critics have kept Capote’s homosexuality at arm’s length, preferring his most “masculine” work, acknowledging his homosexuality but seeming as disinterested in the interaction between Capote’s sexuality and his work as L. Trilling was in Forster’s. Neglect of Capote’s corpus and persona extends past mainstream literary criticism into critical subgenres that might reasonably be expected to discuss and value Capote. Why have gay, lesbian, and queer scholars been reluctant to “claim” him and engage with his work? First, not only does Capote’s debut antedate the homophile and gay liberation movements, placing his early career off the usual historical trajectory, but also his public 87 persona—which progressively overshadowed his writing, transforming him in the mass media from a celebrated author into pure celebrity—can easily be seen as the cliché against which these movements defined themselves. 7 From his debut, Capote offered the performance of shock, spectacle, and scandal that was antithetical to the homophile movement, which was preoccupied with the quest for homosexual men and women to be seen as respectable, unexceptional members of society. Conversely, Gay Liberationists in the 60s and 70s who affiliated themselves with the counterculture were likely to find Capote—a fixture on talk shows and charter member of the Jet Set—an Establishment figure to be ignored if not repudiated. Capote’s televised gender nonconformity, frequent public intoxication, and expertise at vicious gossip were understood as an embodiment of the homophobic stereotypes they struggled to defeat. 8 Capote’s work was as unpalatable as his person to many gay and lesbian activists and scholars, especially those of the Stonewall generation. His fiction’s coupling of homosexuality with effeminacy and its preoccupation with the deep psychological trauma of internalized homophobia didn’t mesh happily with the needs of those men and women who were fighting to delist homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s manual of mental disorders. Furthermore, Capote’s interest in the psyches of queer and homosexual children was difficult to parse at a time when gays and lesbians were struggling to prove that homosexuality was not a result of early trauma or a stage of arrested development, when gay children made no blink on the radar of the gay and lesbian movement, and when gays and lesbians were frequently collated with pedophiles. 9 88 Claude Summers’s well-respected Gay Fictions: Wilde to Stonewall (1990) offers an example of the poor fit between Capote and the ideology of gay and lesbian studies. Summers’s dismissal of Capote is evident in the page count: Capote warrants less than four pages, compared to twenty-five for Tennessee Williams and twenty for Gore Vidal. Nonetheless, Summers grants Capote half a chapter title—“The Early Fiction of Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams”—presumably because the historical importance of Capote to twentieth-century gays and gay fictions demands it. This inconsistency of representation here is a measure of Summers’s (and the field’s) discomfort with Capote. For Summers, Capote is the inferior face of the inferior school of mid-century gay representation. Summers sets up an opposition between Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and the work of southerners Capote and Tennessee Williams. Vidal offers “a significant contribution to the literature of homosexuality” because The City shows that “homosexuality is a normal variation of human behavior” (128-9). 10 Conversely, Capote and Williams, under the influence of Carson McCullers, “reveled in the extraordinariness of their exotic—even freakish—characters” and presented homosexuality “less as a social problem than as a manifestation of love’s essential irrationality” (130). Capote is the worst of the three Southern writers because his art is inferior (a charge Summers pronounces but does not argue) and because his vision of homosexuality is objectionable. Other Voices, Other Rooms lacks the “philosophical seriousness and sure vision of McCullers’s work” (131) and is “muddled and sensational [while] Williams’s gay fictions are altogether more affirmative” (25). 11 While Capote “reduces homosexuality to the status of an affliction and the death wish…a fearful and 89 tormented flight of fantasy,” Williams “documents the cruelty and oppression suffered by gay people in mid-century America” and makes “strong and healthy contributions to the literature of compassion” (133, 25, 133). Summers makes this last claim while discussing “Desire and the Black Masseur” (1948), within which a masseur beats his willing client and thereby brings him to his first orgasm. 12 The abuse escalates until the masseur kills the client and eats his corpse. I agree with Summers that the story is “an allegory of the effects of guilt and feelings of unworthiness” but question why Summers finds this story more “affirming” than Other Voices, which doesn’t draw nearly as close a correspondence between homosexuality, pain, and death (139). Summers’s primary objection to Other Voices seems to be that the novel offers “homosexuality [as] a negation of masculinity, not simply because it involves effeminacy and transvestitism but also, and most importantly, because it signifies passive resignation and despair” (132). After all, in “Desire,” the masochism of the client is balanced by the virility of the masseur. In other words, Summer’s actual objection to Other Voices is that the novel is too weak, childish, and “girly”—a charge that accords with Capote’s persona, which is considerably more womanish than Williams’s. By Summers’s active, manly, and affirming rubric—a common rubric in gay studies—Capote fails. The later generation of scholars who work within the disciplinary confines of queer studies and who hold as an overriding principle the constructedness of all gender and sexuality has not found Capote much more appealing. Generally speaking, queer theorists have been invested in uncovering queer aspects of the “normal” and challenging 90 set categories such as “gay,” “lesbian,” and “heterosexual.” Even though Capote's public performance of effeminacy puts the categories of “male” and “female” under stress, he has not inspired much queer scholarship. This is most likely due to Capote’s continued popularity as a gay writer and celebrity. Capote was one of most famous writers in the United States throughout his long career, and his public reputation has never been eclipsed. His unexpected death in 1984 was followed by a media blitz that was repeated with the posthumous publication of his incomplete opus Answered Prayers (1987) and the positive reception to his authorized biography (Clarke 1988). Both were bestsellers. The biographical play Tru won a Tony in 1989, and a televised performance won an Emmy in 1992. George Plimpton’s 1997 oral history placed Capote back on the bestseller list, and in the 2000s, Random House released a spate of Capote material: his collected short stories (2004), his collected letters (2004), his “lost” first novel (2005), and his collected essays (2007), all of which prompted retrospectives of Capote’s person and work in the arts press. The movies Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006) extended such attention outside the reading public. 13 Despite Capote’s low status in gay and lesbian studies, he never lost his place as an effeminate, outrageous, dissolute gay icon of a type that predated the Stonewall era. Since Capote was never forgotten, he can’t easily provide the thrills of academic discovery and revival. And since Capote was and remains so publicly gay, he’s no fun to “queer.” This scholarly neglect is unfortunate, as Capote’s persona and writing have obvious relevance for both the political objectives of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory’s interest in the creation of identity. Capote’s words and actions are best seen not 91 as arising from a coherent, established political ideology (much less a manipulative realpolitik) but rather as one of the personal stirrings from which such ideologies develop. In a letter to his partner Richard Hunter written on June 8, 1946, Leo Lerman offers an example of such “stirrings” a few months before Capote meets the Trillings on the train: The other night when I was talking about homosexuality, I said—why I do not now know—how it was a sickness; how anything which deviates from the norm or the average must be or make for sickness, for the norm and the average do not condone deviations and put all who deviate outside. This outsideness—for all one’s arrogance—does provide some little distortion or some anguish or some pain. This pain, this incompatibility, is part of sickness….When I said this, [Capote] was furious. He said that I had a distorted view of life, that everyone condoned homosexuality, that everyone knew about it and didn’t even think about it. So I saw that this creature had a very immature and idealistic approach to life….When I tried to tell him that if he got into a sex scandal no one save avant- garde publications would publish him, he said that I really had the most morbid approach to life, that he couldn’t believe that [Harper’s] Bazaar would not publish him. Do you think that this is how the younger people really all think? (31-32) Capote’s understanding of homosexuality and its consequences differentiates him not only from the Trillings but also from Lerman, who, though he explicitly repudiates the current understanding of homosexuality as mental illness, nonetheless uses psychoanalytic terms—“sickness,” “deviation”—to describe the internalized effects of discrimination and oppression. Was Capote as naïve as Lerman claims, or so willful and aggressive that he enjoyed unusual freedom? Certainly the careers of academics such as Newton Arvin, Capote’s lover at the time of Lerman’s letter, were destroyed by scandal (1960), and the fear of such scandal helped drive others such as F. O. Matthiessen to suicide (1950). 14 Creative writers benefited from the looser constraints of bohemia, but both their careers and the freedom to write as they chose were frequently stunted by the 92 threat and practice of such scandal for much of the twentieth century. Yet Capote’s career never suffered in any obvious way and arguably benefited from his openly homosexual public persona and the frequent appearance of homosexual characters and themes in his work. 15 Furthermore, there is no record of any homophobic violence directed towards the adult Capote. At least in his own case, he wins his argument with Lerman. This chapter judges whether he also wins his fight with the Trillings. “We Had A Very Pleasant Time”: The Fracas in Context The written records of the Capote/Trilling fracas have contradictory dates. These dates are important because the chronological placement of this meeting in terms of Capote’s career makes the Trillings either more or less important to him, and because D. Trilling’s coming-or-already-written review of Other Voices would be influential, and would either be affected by the Trillings’ encounter with Capote or itself affect Capote’s reaction to the couple. Diana Trilling writes in her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey (1993), that she met Capote in 1943 or 44 (when he was 18 or 19): close to the publication of L. Trilling’s E. M. Forster (1943) but before Capote’s first major publication, the short story “Miriam” in the June, 1945 Mademoiselle (110). Plimpton, however, puts Trilling’s oral history in the 1947 section of his Capote. 1946 is most likely, as Capote writes that he “rode up to Conn. with the Trillings last Saturday” in an August 17, 1946 letter to Mary Louise “Pidgy” Aswell, fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar (Too Brief 30). Capote also mentions the train ride in a letter to Lerman the day before (Too Brief 31), and both letters specify that this was his first meeting with the Trillings— 93 which accords with Barry Werth’s claim that Capote escorted Newton Arvin to a meal with the Trillings in 1947 (109). D. Trilling also seems mistaken in the Plimpton when she claims that she “knew [Capote’s] name, of course, because I had written something about him by this time” (70); I have found no reference by her to Capote before her review of Other Voices in the January 31, 1948 Nation. In whichever year the New Haven Railroad stuttered from Grand Central Station up through Connecticut, Capote’s speech and behavior constructed identity; he not only visually and audibly exhibits homosexuality but also claims the necessary relevance of sexual orientation to the self and its products. For Capote, the elision of Forster’s homosexuality was “impossible”— Forster’s art could not be discussed outside the context of his sexuality. Capote interrogates Lionel Trilling on three valences of knowledge: Does he know? Had he heard? Did he guess? Certainly other critics had implied Forster’s sexuality by 1946. In D. Trilling’s narrative in the Plimpton, Capote then correctly states that Forster “had left a homosexual novel in the British Museum, and that at his death it would be found”—Maurice, published in 1971, after Forster’s death (71). To which “Lionel said this would be interesting but he wasn’t particularly concerned about it for his book, and that was it” (70). The conversation was over—a silence that was representative of the humanist mid-century stance towards homosexuality and gender issues. In D. Trilling’s memoir, the anecdote is much shorter, and the conflict boils down: “Why, [Capote] demanded, had Lionel, in writing about Forster, not dealt with Forster’s homosexuality? Lionel explained that he had not known of Forster’s 94 homosexuality when he wrote the book; the possibility had occurred to him only when he was reaching the end” (110). Here, D. Trilling collapses and simplifies into L.’s belated realization (1) L.’s refusal to acknowledge Forster’s orientation until browbeaten by Capote, and (2) L.’s insistence that he didn’t treat Forster’s sexuality in his study because he didn’t think it was relevant. By contrast, in the face of willful disinterest from powerful authority figures, the Capote of the oral history insists that Forster’s sexuality has not only marked his text but also is relevant to his literary production. Capote’s comments are courageous because of his relative position of power to the Trillings within the academic and literary worlds, and his refutation of contemporary standards of literary criticism. Moreover, Capote demands recognition and respect for a minority not then commonly conceptualized as such, much less of deserving civil rights, or even serious attention. Such aggressive intervention was risky, for at this historical moment, his demand for the discussion of Forster’s sexuality was tantamount to revealing his own orientation to the Trillings and any eavesdropper. D. Trilling displaces this revelation onto the physical and physiological, onto the odd looks and “extraordinary squeaky voice” (Beginning 110) that, for her, reduces and dehumanizes Capote to a “little creature” (Plimpton 70). Trilling thus shows her understanding of Capote’s indirect (however recognizable) signification of his homosexuality. Capote’s behavior is remarkable because he asserts his gay identity not only tacitly but also through the direct, public mention of homosexuality and its importance to literary analysis. Capote presumably knew the dangers of his assertion—dangers that Diana Trilling projects upon her fear of a mob lynching, a fear that masks the professional risk 95 Capote took of a literary lynching by the Trillings. Yet while Capote’s direct naming of homosexuality is an aggressive assertion of homosexuality, it is still an identitarian performance rather than a direct statement of identity. Capote does not directly say that his own homosexuality causes him to find L. Trilling’s silence “impossible,” and here the difference between the connotation and denotation of homosexuality is large. Or is it? Capote’s self-consciousness about how he is perceived becomes relevant here. Perhaps Capote assumes that his look and manner offers sufficient public announcement that he’s gay, as they did for D. Trilling. If so, Lerman’s letter to Richard Hunter offers evidence that Capote would assume that the passengers “condoned homosexuality, that everyone knew about it and didn’t even think about it” (31). Certainly, Capote’s letter to Pidgy Aswell lacks an overt politics: I ran up to Conn. with the Trillings last Saturday (how this came about is very amusing; Leo [Lerman] had shown me some photographs of them, and while I was buying my train ticket who should be standing in line behind me but etc….so I introduced myself, wasn’t that bold? and we had a very pleasant time) and liked them ever so much. (32) Capote is less sunny in the previous day’s letter to Lerman: I introduced myself, and I am glad I did, for [the Trillings] were very sweet, and we had a pleasant ride on the train together. I liked them enormously—but, because of various things, I’m afraid I was in rather a jittery state, and made a bad impression. (31) Contrast this fear of a bad impression with D. Trilling’s fear of a lynching, or her more modest claim in her memoir that “the mere sound of Capote’s voice roused the passengers in our railroad car and as he went on to speak of Forster’s homosexuality, one could feel the air thickening with hostility” (110). As D. Trilling tells and writes it, the Trillings’ encounter with Capote verges from the tense to the terrible—a likely concern 96 that Capote would want to share with Lerman and Aswell, with whom he frequently shared career troubles and personal disasters and dislikes. Did Capote’s “amusing time” with the Trillings indeed make the other passengers “uncomfortable, angry at him, very angry?” Perhaps when D. Trilling writes that “Truman wasn’t watching or if he was he didn’t let on,” she is accurate; perhaps he didn’t find the conversation extraordinary (Plimpton 70). But for the Trillings, Capote’s very existence as an assured gay man was violent, and his casual conversation was aggression of an extreme and unusual kind. He asserts a formulation of homosexuality that they could not incorporate into their liberal imaginations—precisely the failure of the liberal imagination that L. Trilling exposes in E. M. Forster. The Limits of the Liberal Imagination: Forster and Lionel Trilling Lionel Trilling’s baldly stated lack of concern for and interest in Forster’s homosexuality is of a piece with Wimsatt and Beardsley’s manifestos against the intentional (1946) and affective (1949) fallacies, which delineated the New Critics’ demand that criticism be restricted to the text. 16 Such demands were shaped by the value of impersonality in art found in T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), which hold that artistic success depends not on self- examination but on the ability to produce a concrete expression of emotion. As the text itself contains what is needed for its interpretation, Wimsat and Beardsley find an author’s intent and a reader’s subjective experience immaterial to literary criticism. 97 The Trillings were not New Critics but shared their tone of high seriousness and practice of rigorous close reading, and were very much part of the paradigm shift that led to Wimsatt and Beardsley’s manifestos. In addition, the New York Intellectuals wanted to democratize literary criticism, and shunning the intentional and affective fallacies released the critic from the need to be justified by ethnic, national, or religious background. This move accorded with the New York Intellectuals’ past as collegiate Trotskyites who believed in an international proletariat and the brotherhood of man. This move also had the additional benefit of helping L. Trilling and others win tenure at schools that previously had rarely if ever granted it to Jews. While the political engagement that the New York Intellectuals inherited from the Old Left led them to historicize texts for political purposes, such historicization skirted personal biography in general and sexual orientation in particular, and on the New Haven Railroad of 1946, Trilling’s dismissal of Forster’s homosexuality would seem to need no defense against a young, loud stranger. Yet Trilling’s dismissal is difficult to defend in the context of Maurice and in terms of his own attack upon the limits of the liberal imagination. Consider how Trilling drops Capote’s proffer of Maurice. By 1946, Forster had published five novels: Where Angels Fear To Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howard’s End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). Another novel would have been relevant to Trilling, whose E. M. Forster was composed of an introduction, a chapter on Forster’s intellectual and artistic development, a chapter on the short stories, and a chapter on each novel. Trilling might choose not to write about an unpublished novel (or discuss the matter with Capote), but it is unlikely that it didn’t 98 “concern [him] very much” (Plimpton 70). Yet neither Diana nor Lionel Trilling acknowledges much less comments upon Maurice, either within the longer anecdote or in its frame. Instead, Maurice closes the conversation—and disappears entirely from the memoir’s shorter version. L. Trilling’s 1964 introduction to the second edition of E. M. Forster continues to avoid Maurice and Forster’s sexuality; Trilling writes that he has become friends with Forster, but feels that “the reader, and Mr. Forster’s art, and criticism itself, are best served by early and impersonal opinions” (iv). Trilling’s book was reissued in 1971, two years after the Stonewall Riots, probably in the hope of catching some sales from the 1971 publication of Maurice. 1971 was hence a big year for Forster in both mass and literary culture—but Trilling, though he was still writing, had no comment on either Forster's or his novel's homosexual focus. Trilling neither revised his 1964 introduction nor discussed Forster's homosexuality anywhere else. As D. Trilling writes, “That was it.” The novel, like Capote’s comments, cannot be incorporated into either Trilling’s liberal imagination. 17 Lionel Trilling introduces his collected essays (1950) by noting his “abiding interest in the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism, especially in the relation of those ideas to literature” (ix). He notes that “the conscious and the unconscious life of liberalism are not always in accord” (xiii) and demands the recollection of liberalism’s “first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty” (xv). In E. M. Forster, Trilling offers a path to such recollection: A sense of “moral reality, which is not the awareness of morality itself but 99 of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life” (6). Through Forster, Trilling diagnoses the liberal unconscious: All [Forster’s] novels are politically and morally tendentious and always in the liberal direction. Yet he is deeply at odds with the liberal mind, and while liberal readers can go a long way with Forster, they can seldom go all the way. They can understand him when he attacks the manners and morals of the British middle class, when he speaks out for spontaneity of feeling, for the virtues of sexual fulfillment, for the values of intelligence…But sooner or later they begin to make reservations…they feel that he is challenging them as well as what they dislike. And they are right. For all his long commitment to the doctrines of liberalism, Forster is at war with the liberal imagination. Surely if liberalism has a single desperate weakness, it is an inadequacy of imagination: liberalism is always being surprised. (13) The Trillings are certainly surprised by Capote, who hangs L. by his own critique. D. tells us that L.’s comprehension of Forster “began to dawn on,” had “occurred to” him as he wrote his critical study (Plimpton 71; D. Trilling, Beginning 110). How? Why? If L. Trilling restricted himself to a close reading, then homosexual erotics and thematics must be embedded within the text itself for such a dawn to rise. Furthermore, Forster’s treatment of homosexuality in Maurice, and his refusal to publish, would seem relevant to “the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life.” Moreover, Forster’s homosexuality would seem to have aided him in achieving the critical perspective on liberalism that Trilling admires—and Trilling admits that “Biography intrudes itself into literary judgment and keeps it from being ‘pure’….although we call extraneous the facts that thrust themselves upon us, they inevitably enter into our judgment” (Forster 113). Trilling mentions this in the context of gaps in Forster’s novel- writing; that these gaps were filled in part by writing Maurice as well as the homoerotic stories posthumously published in The Life to Come (1972) goes unmentioned. 100 Maurice aside, homosexual erotics and themes are easily extracted from Forster’s work. Trilling, a keen reader of class, proves blind to them—or chooses to overlook them. Consider the most conventional of the novels, A Room with a View, within which Lucy and George, a man and woman (unlike Maurice) of the same ethnicity (unlike Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Passage to India) and same class (unlike all the novels but Room) who remain within accepted gender roles and bounds (unlike all the novels but Room) as they overcome a variety of obstacles on their way to a happy and presumably fruitful heterosexual marriage (unlike all but Howard’s End). On a country outing, Lucy Honeychurch finds herself in a field of flowers: From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran in rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue, eddying around the tree stems, collecting into pools in the hollows, covering the grass with spots of azure foam….For a moment [George] contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her. (80) Charlotte Bartlett, Lucy’s maiden aunt, removes Lucy not only from the kiss but also from Florence and into the arms of Cecil Vyse. Cecil and Lucy share the next kiss, which does not parallel the first: “She gave such a business-like lift to her veil. As he approached her he found time to wish that he could recoil. As he touched her, his gold pince-nez became dislodged and was flattened between them” (124). The actual parallel to the “pools of violets” comes when George, Lucy’s brother, and the parson bathe in a pool, the Sacred Grove. This is the only scene within which Englishmen exhibit physicality, much less naked abandon; as Eric Haralson writes, “Masculine bodies and desires notably romp” (62). 18 101 Plotwise, there is little reason for this romp’s length and breadth. Though the scene does eventually offer a naked George up to Lucy, the action is mano-a-mano-a- mano, with greens on the side: it reminded one of swimming in a salad. Three gentlemen rotated in the pool breast high, after the fashion of the nymphs in Götterdammerung…. Then all the forces of youth burst out. [George] smiled, flung himself at them, splashed them, ducked them, kicked them, muddied them, and drove them out of the pool….They ran to get dry, they bathed to get cool, they played at being Indians in the willow- herbs, they bathed to get clean…the two young men were delirious. Away they twinkled into the trees, Freddy with a clerical waistcoat under his arm, George with a wide-awake hat on his dripping hair. (150-51) The scene is remarkable in the context of the otherwise proper action of the novel—and the parallel in terms of vegetation and water imagery is unmistakable. The pool of violets has become the Sacred Grove. Trilling’s knowledge of the unpublished Maurice shows how easily he might recognize such displacement, and Leslie Fiedler’s groundbreaking 1948 analysis of homoerotics in “Come Back To The Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”—in the Partisan Review, no less—shows that homosexual readings were being made and published. 19 Yet Trilling demonstrates little attention to Forster’s detailed sensuality. Trilling does not note the water imagery of the first kiss, and ignores the Sacred Grove except to say that “George has been swimming with Freddy and Mr. Beebe in the pool, and the pool in the sun and wind ‘had been a call to the blood and the relaxed will’ and had dispelled his bleak neurotic despair” (Forster 106). From a critic aware of Forster’s sexuality—a critic who holds that, in Room, “As always in Forster, sexuality and right political feeling have a point of contact” (106)—a critic who, summarizing the main theme of Room, quotes 102 Foster that “Love is of the body—not the body, but of the body” (99)—such poor reading is remarkable. Nonetheless, Trilling was invaluable to the investiture of Forster’s reputation, and brought his work to a larger public, among them lesbians and gays. Furthermore, Trilling’s study defends Forster against previous homophobic reviewers, such as F. R. Leavis, who tagged the author as “bent” and “spinsterly” (qtd. in Martin and Piggford 15). Such mixed messages let us parallel Trilling to Lucy’s Aunt Charlotte. When Lucy at last achieves her happy ending, she realizes that her aunt, at first an obstacle to the marriage, engineered a later meeting that confirmed it. Trilling writes: “For when the heroine at last fulfills her destiny, deserts Miss Bartlett and marries the man she has unconsciously loved, she comes to perceive that in some yet more hidden way Miss Bartlett had really desired the union” (10). Trilling, like Charlotte, performs the role of matchmaker at considerable cost. As Trilling raised Forster’s critical profile, he did substantive damage to Forster’s capacity, at least as transmitted by literary critics, to communicate specifics of a homosexual politics and subjectivity. Martin and Piggford hold that Trilling’s work, in its refusal to comment directly on homosexuality and its consistent abstraction of a broad liberal utopianism, is “responsible for a number of well- meaning generalizations that dangerously obscure the very precision of Forster’s observations and the sophisticated political analysis that underlies them and that totally efface any nuanced treatment of sexuality” (10). The path to Forster for an individual gay or lesbian reader was occluded. 103 Nonetheless, for those gay men and women who were primed by their own mental deftness and revolutionary consciousness (and in Capote’s case, an intimate relationship with literary critic Newton Arvin), Trilling’s critique could easily be extended to liberatory ends. Capote and Trilling, and Lucy and Charlotte, are all liberal humanists, though Trilling and Charlotte are unwilling to directly argue on behalf of sexuality; note how Trilling leaves the body out of his critique of a limited liberalism that “drifts towards a denial of the emotions and the imagination” (10). It is not his critical strategy and ethics but his homophobia—either his own or his fear of his readers’—that leaves him silent in his study and on the train. It’s this lack where there could so easily be speech that fascinates Capote. This complex silence contrasts with the relative volubility of Elizabeth Hardwick and D. Trilling, whose response to Capote is shaped by the construction of the “feminine” within the mid-century intelligentsia. A Dainty Blow: Capote and Hardwick Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was a succès de scandale, in no small part due to Capote’s author photo, which recollects Manet’s Olympia. 20 Most reviews of Other Voices referenced the photo as much as the text; reviews of the text itself were positive, with significant reservations. By contrast, Partisan Review, the mouthpiece of the New York Intellectuals, trashed Other Voices in a March 15, 1948 review by novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick. Hardwick was a frequent contributor to The Partisan Review and helped found its intellectual heir, The New York Review of Books. To a large extent, Hardwick’s clouded recognition of the novel’s homosexuality 104 is her critical apparatus, though she mentions it by name only in her opening statement on Capote, when she claims that Other Voices rings a tinkling funeral bell for some of our recent Southern fiction. Here at last is the parody whose appearance was inevitable; amidst sherry and gloom, withering homosexuals, and dainty sadistic young women, many of the devices that have served young Southern writers well have been literally done to death. (376) Where L. Trilling is silent, Hardwick is abusive. Furthermore, her reduction of sexuality to a device, a fictional trope, is profoundly anti-humanist, and moves past the New Critics towards a radical formalism. 21 Hardwick’s other writing reveals her to be a humanist in terms of heterosexuality—which leaves homophobia rather than metaphysics as the fundament of her argument. Note how Hardwick reduces homosexuality to an example of local color parallel to “dainty sadistic young women,” and how these women are given terminal and therefore dominant status among the novel’s characteristics, but do not actually appear in Other Voices. The characters Miss Amy and Florabel might be called dainty, but neither is sadistic, and one is middle-aged and the other pre-adolescent. If dainty is stretched to mean small, the dwarf Miss Wisteria qualifies, but she, too, is not sadistic. Instead, the dainty sadist is Hardwick, whose style is executed with satire and cruelty, and armored by the delicate deployment of vocabulary and tone. Hardwick’s “dainty” yet canny blow forecloses charges of willful ignorance and censorship. She signals her sophistication; she is not averse to discussing homosexuality in the novel but considers it only as important as sherry. Yet consider her own use of the term “rings a tinkling funeral bell,” with its arch construction and indirect reference to fairies, in its self-consciousness closer to the writing of Ronald Firbank than Capote. If homosexuality is so unworthy of consideration, why does Hardwick use camp for 105 homophobic ends? She indicates familiarity and ease with homosexual dialect to discredit it—a doubly-reversed discourse that perverts Firbank. Hardwick’s slight mention of homosexuality and use of camp dialect is just that—a slight, as serious consideration would require a politics that allowed for the apprehension of homosexuality as a serious subject. Such consideration did not come quickly for Hardwick. Fifteen years later, while reviewing Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964) for The New York Review of Books, she notes that that “Isherwood's books have all been homosexual in spirit; even campy. Perhaps the surprising thing is that he has so often been able to be a serious artist at the same time” (4). For Hardwick, homosexuality may be trivial, but it is also constitutive: “[The hero] has a fairly modest anal disposition, respectable enough, with a finicky, faggoty interest in the looks of things.” Hardwick’s exploration of homosexuality continues in her best-regarded novel, Sleepless Nights (1979), which sports a gay character whose “anal disposition” is more pronounced: his “unyielding need to brush his perfect teeth after dinner….did much to inhibit his sex life” (30). The novel's lesbian fares worse: grinding away in rage for her Ph. D., she became or decided she was a lesbian. In a frightened, angry plunge, she fell into a desperate affair with a handsome older woman from England. And what did she find there? Happiness, consolation? No, she found, with her ineluctable ill-luck, a nightmare of betrayals, lies, deceits, shocks, infidelities, dismissals. (19) This is the sole example of female same-sex desire that I have found in Hardwick's corpus, of which Joan Didion has noted that “the mysterious and somnambulistic ‘difference’ of being a woman has been, over 35 years, Elizabeth Hardwick's great 106 subject, the topic to which she has returned incessantly” (60). Such mysteries do not include sexual orientation, as female same-sex desire in Hardwick’s world is a product of rage and productive of nightmares. Hardwick offers a case study of a writer who defines herself as a social liberal but whose past degradation of homosexuality is neither addressed nor rethought in print. While I do not pretend to understand Hardwick’s distaste for homosexuality in general and Other Voices in particular, I believe that it stems in part from the gendered mechanisms responsible for the publication and reproduction of Capote’s fiction. For from the broad generic sward upon which Capote pitches his specific fictional tent, to his places of publication, to the superstructure of the career that supports this publication, Capote almost invariably lands on the feminine side of a gendered binary. Until In Cold Blood, Capote’s career, as well as his persona and art, is almost entirely effeminate—and thus, in the cultural context of the late 1940s, supremely queer. When it comes to self- promotion, Capote is a career girl non-pareil. Girls’ School: The Gendering of Literary Publication at Mid-Century In “Adolescence and Maturity in the American Novel” (1955), and again five years later in Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fiedler engenders two schools of fiction: one associated with Harper’s Bazaar, the other with Partisan Review. I pick Harper’s Bazaar to stand for a whole group which includes Mademoiselle and Vogue…. Harper's Bazaar is, of course, not primarily a literary magazine at all, but an elegant fashion magazine for women, read not only by those who can afford the goods it advertises but by many who cannot and who participate in its world of values, picking it up on the table of a beauty-parlor waiting room. 107 Finding a story by, say, Truman Capote tucked away between the picture of a determinedly unbeautiful model and an ad for a brassiere, most of the readers of Harper’s Bazaar, one assumes, must simply skip the meaningless pages; and knowing this, the editors know that they can print anything they please. (200) Fiedler’s binary is strengthened by his clever use of Harper’s Bazaar—a distaff spin-off of the securely “male” Harper’s—as the standard-bearer of feminine discourse. What do we find in the bazaar? Questionable goods. Characteristically, Fiedler’s protean sensibility and deadpan satire make him hard to parse. His view of the material considerations of publishing in mid-century women’s magazines is accurate in denotation if not connotation: the material experience of reading Capote’s stories as first published was marked by women’s advertising. Nonetheless, Fiedler’s use of Capote as an emblematic author of a degraded “female” fiction, in essence filler between ads, reveals Capote’s power and effeminacy in literary culture, and how this culture was gendered and valued by an influential critic who placed himself on the Partisan side of the line. Thus Capote confided his encounter with the Trillings to Leo Lerman and Pidgy Aswell, whose association with Harper’s Bazaar secured them on the “female” side of Fiedler’s bifurcated literary world. Fiedler makes “art” the province of Partisan writers and associates, positions their writing as masculine, and gives it value. As D. Trilling sniffs, “There was nothing light- mindedly fashionable about reading the Nation. It was an obligation of intelligence” (Beginning 331). Fiedler parallels Capote with rich women whose glamour seduces the poor to share in capitalist ideology through vicarious commodity fetishism. He dismisses and dirties both, fulfilling the demand of masculine hegemony that other holders of power (here, women with money and men who do not toe the sexual line) be put down. 108 Fiedler, a Jewish egghead with a groundbreaking study of homoerotics to his androgynous name, bolsters his masculine bona fides by showing how rich women and homosexual men are not interested in art but decoration, thereby fortifying the palace of art against the feminine intruder—or more precisely, making these “feminine” contributions superficial, additions to interior decoration instead of structural soundness. Any evidence of intellectual sophistication in Harper’s Bazaar, whether it be a “determinedly unbeautiful model” or Capote’s fiction, is either a complicated form of advertising or “meaningless.” Those who are not [straight] men do not read or compose art, but instead participate in a new sort of sensibility, defined by a taste for haute couture, classical ballet, baroque opera, the rites and vestments of Catholicism—and above all for a type of literature at once elegantly delicate and bitterly grotesque. This new kind of sensibility, although (or perhaps because) it is quite frankly a homosexual one, appeals profoundly to certain rich American women with cultural aspirations, and is therefore sponsored in their salons and published decoratively in magazines that cater to their tastes. (201-202) The direct mention of male homosexuality crowns a litany of disgust and damns an entire aesthetic with the red robes of Baron Corvo. Against such fiction, Fiedler positions Partisan writers such as Saul Bellow, who are “‘political’…not only do they have Marx in their blood…but also Freud…as well as contemporary sociology, anthropology, and philosophy in general” (204). In other words, these are serious, important (straight) men who write about serious, important things: (straight) men’s things. Fiedler takes a middle position between L. Trilling and Hardwick; he neither consigns homosexuality to silence nor dismisses it with clever abuse, but rather offers a considered (if homophobic) opinion. Furthermore, he complicates his binary: Partisan 109 Review has published “wickedly witty” Mary McCarthy, and Tennessee Williams and Paul Bowles, who retain a “sensibility, shriller or icier, but not fundamentally different from that which informs the fiction of the ladies’ magazines” (206; 203). But in general, Fiedler’s lines of gender, sexuality, and value draw Hardwick and D. Trilling into a cross-gendered position—and reveal the stakes in their response to homosexuality (as linked to effeminacy) in general and to Capote in particular. 22 Women in the Partisan coterie were constantly reminded that their gender trumped their intellectual production in the eyes of most of their peers. In the 1998 documentary Arguing the World, Diana Trilling recollects the outsider status of women among the New York Intellectuals: “Unless a man in the intellectual community was bent on sexual conquest, he was never intimate with a woman. He wanted to be with the men. They always wanted to huddle in a corner to talk.” Irving Kristol corroborates D. Trilling’s account with an anecdote of sitting down with a plate of party food and being sandwiched by D. Trilling, Hannah Arendt, and Mary McCarthy, who began an intense discussion about psychoanalysis: “I sat there quiet and terror-stricken. I was a prisoner.” Though Kristol’s tone indicates that he finds the memory funny, he corroborates male discomfort when engaging in cross-gendered, non-sexualized discussion—a discomfort that stemmed from a sense of perversion in the “natural” order of things. Women who wanted their intellect taken seriously by the Partisan man were therefore well-advised to distance their writing from subjects and places of publications that Partisan man viewed as feminine. 110 The resulting pressure upon these women to distance themselves from and degrade Capote must have been considerable. Consider Fiedler’s perception of Capote as a girlish Satan, as almost a caricature of the type: the ‘queen’ as American author, possessing a kind of beauty, both in person and as an artist, which belongs to childhood and early adolescence, and which withers before it can ripen. (202) 23 Hardwick and her intellectual sisters exhibit the tendency of the subordinated to raise their own standing by attacking each other instead of making common cause to change the parameters of dominance. Yet without Diana Trilling’s close attention, the record would be bare. We see Capote vs. L. Trilling primarily through D’s eyes, and though we may seek to correct her astigmatism, it’s her memory, relation, and understanding that keep us from near- complete conjecture. D. Trilling speaks only in her narrative frame, not on the train itself, where she enacts the demure “little woman.” It’s likely that her own subject position and self-representation gave her common (if subterranean) cause with Capote at a time when homosexuality was very closely associated with femininity. This would explain her fascination with Capote’s attempt to discuss the unmentionable—and with her husband’s silence at Capote’s charge that he has insufficiently attended to sexuality, then coeval with gender. By this train of argument, Capote says what D. Trilling can neither say nor consciously desire saying. Thus her fascination and reportage. 111 A Double Response: Capote and Diana Trilling Diana Trilling acknowledges ambivalence as she begins her January 31, 1948 review of Other Voices in the Nation: It is seldom that I have so double a response to a book….not since the early work of Eudora Welty has there been an example of such striking literary virtuosity….On the other hand, I find myself deeply antipathetic to the whole artistic-moral purpose of Mr. Capote’s novel. In Mr. Capote’s case, as with so many of our gifted contemporary artists, I would freely trade eighty percent of his technical skill for twenty percent more value in the uses to which it is put. We see here an aesthetic that requires art to have moral purpose and value. Trilling’s politics, though complex and bivalent, are consistent and overt throughout her reviewing career (1942-49). Her collected reviews emphasize that fiction both represents and acts upon culture—“literature is no mere decoration of life but an index of the health or sickness of society” (Reviewing 208)—and that this index, as it catalogues, must have social utility—“Probably there has never been a time when so many people wrote so ‘well’ as now but to such meager purpose” (224). Yet Trilling rejects crude recipes for social change; she dislikes “the use of the novel as a crude vehicle for argument or as an educational display-piece” (199); decries “the chief trend in our progressive literary culture…this mechanical notion that the individual finds himself by losing himself in some larger social manifestation” (183); and observes that “a large part of the anemia of our current fiction must surely be due to the soft political idealism which is its major inspiration” (133). What does she prefer? “An analysis of political forces without political analyses” (104). This parallels L. Trilling’s belief that crude systemization inevitably leads to unfortunate simplification. 24 112 D. Trilling’s consistent demand—stronger than her husband’s—that literature have and inspire humanist values and therefore actively promote political good ties her to existential humanism and distinguishes her from other New York Intellectuals, “cultural radicals” who never found an ideology to replace the certainty of the Old Left’s faith in Marxism, and held what Irving Howe calls “a radicalism without immediate political ends but pointed towards criticism of a meretricious culture” (34). Diana shares their aggression, but instead of arguing her position, simply pronounces each week in “Fiction in Review.” Lionel, by contrast, argues at length—but without Diana’s certain tone, perhaps because his view of his work’s importance and attendant responsibility is stronger. D. Trilling’s welts of subordination—her gender, her status as the wife of a more respected critic, and her job as a writer of book reviews whose length does not allow sustained analysis—thus harden into a defensive shield. Why attack Diana and her witty reviews when one may go after Lionel at length? She therefore gained authority and influence from her column without much dissent. D. Trilling’s internal and external challenges as a woman writer are detailed in her autobiography, where she writes that she was offered a named column after writing a few unsigned reviews at the Nation: Now that I was to sign what I wrote, the question arose of what name I should choose, my maiden name or my name as Lionel’s wife. Socially I was always known by my married name. We consulted our friends at Partisan Review. They were united in the advice that I write under my maiden name; they feared that I was going to be an embarrassment to Lionel. But Lionel was adamant that I write as his wife. (328) The Partisans corroborate D. Trilling’s own internalization of the lesser value of women’s writing—a judgment Trilling often extends in her own reviews of women 113 writers. Trilling’s self-subordination extends even to her autobiography’s title—The Beginning of the Journey, which alludes to her husband’s novel The Middle of the Journey—and its subtitle, The Marriage of Lionel and Diana Trilling. She reflects: The question most often asked of me by interviewers is: How did it feel to be Lionel’s wife? How, they mean, did it feel to be a critic in my own right but married to a better and more famous critic than I? My honest if unfashionable answer is that it felt fine….I never had any doubt in my mind but that, of the two of us, he was the more important writer. (350) D. Trilling’s investment in this judgment ensures that she would be threatened and repulsed (if also fascinated) by the homosexuality that was understood as a perversion of gender norms and development not only in the mass media of the 1940s but also in the mid-century psychoanalytic establishment that corroborated this narrow view of gender and sexuality. 25 Such revulsion was heightened by Capote’s aggressive and successful presentation of an effeminate, hypersexualized public persona, and the extraordinary success of Other Voices, a novel that was written in a feminine idiom and overtly references homosexuality. Nonetheless, Trilling is more tolerant than many of her peers. She doesn’t exhibit a problem with homosexuality and gay and lesbian authors as such, and Christopher Isherwood’s Prater Violet (1945) receives her best review of the decade; it is “the most completely realized new novel I have read in a long time but it is also a charming novel which yet reverberates with important meaning.” (Reviewing 137). Prater Violet fulfills Trilling’s requirement that this meaning not be simplistic; the novel “is a book without a political moral yet a profound moral-political statement. It is gay, witty, and sophisticated but it is wholly responsible” (137, italics mine). Trilling affords her praise 114 in part because “it is a book written in the author’s own person but is without ego”; the queerness of the narrating “Christopher” is incidental to a novel that focuses on a leftist, Jewish German refugee who fulfills Trilling’s definition of a proper hero much better than the narrator—or Joel Knox (137). Trilling’s review of Other Voices, and her struggle with her homophobic subject position and with the public silence that swathed homosexuality in the late 40s, underscores the political importance of Capote’s words on the train. Compelled by her politics to support humanist values and reject any blanket ideology, Trilling achieves greater depth in discussing homosexuality in Capote’s work than any other contemporary critic—but her inability to recognize homosexual identity as a positive achievement manipulates this great humanist into the crudest type of demonization. For as Capote is Satan to Leslie Fiedler, so Joel Knox, to Diana Trilling, is Hitler. She interprets the novel’s thesis thus: Despite its fantastic paraphernalia, Other Voices, Other Rooms does manage to convey a serious content. At the end of the book young Joel turns to the homosexual love offered him by Randolph and we realize that in his slow piling up of nightmare denial, Mr. Capote has been attempting to re-create the mental background to sexual inversion. What his book is saying is that a boy becomes a homosexual when the circumstances of his life deny him other more normal gratifications of his need for affection. (231) There could be no clearer statement of the mid-century view of homosexuality as an unfortunate detour of psychological development. Instead of seeing Joel’s nightmarish experiences as products of both external and internalized homophobia, she sees them as productive of homosexuality. 115 After reiterating her husband’s strategy of silence and disinterest—“Well, I am not equipped to argue whether or not this is a sound explanation of the source of homosexuality. Nor does the question interest me here.”—Trilling repeats the transference we saw on the train, when she projected her own anger and fear onto the unlikely supposition that there would be a lynching (231). Note her rhetoric and the extent of her displacement as she states that the cause of homosexuality is immaterial to the propriety of prejudice against homosexuals: Much more arresting is the implication of Mr. Capote’s book that, having been given an explanation of the cause of Joel’s homosexuality, we have been given all the ground we need for a proper attitude toward it and toward Joel as a member of society. For what other meaning can we possibly draw from this portrait of a passive victim of his early circumstances than that we must always think of him in this light, that even when Joel will be thirty or forty we will still have to judge him only as the passive victim of his early circumstances, we have all of us, heterosexuals no less than homosexuals, been formed by our early experience. Is no member of society, then, to be held accountable for himself, not even a Hitler? (231, italics Trilling) How does Trilling get from the Joel at the book’s close to Joel at thirty/forty? Via his author, famously in his early twenties. Trilling abandons the New Critics’ script, holds Capote accountable for writing Other Voices, and gives notice that neither now nor in the future should he expect to be forgiven for being gay because he’s written about his childhood. For the grown-up Joel, by virtue of his homosexuality, is coeval with the Hitler who for Diana Trilling, a politically active anti-fascist Jew, is the nadir. After pronouncing homosexuality’s cause and treatment, Trilling draws an existentialist moral and speaks against “an adult world of passive acceptance in which we are rendered incapable of thinking anybody responsible for anything” (232). Here 116 Trilling clarifies that homosexuality is a choice, and a bad one. Her reading of Other Voices as an origin tale of homosexuality allows her to criticize the novel’s blanket indorsement [sic] of the deterministic principle….With startling regularity our most talented young novelists present us with child heroes who are never permitted to grow up into an adulthood which will submit them to the test of conduct. (232, italics Trilling). The Test of Conduct: Capote should put his characters into a position where they may actively choose heterosexuality, and be praised or condemned for their success or failure. Still, D. Trilling is alone among contemporary reviewers in, however distantly, approaching the incestuous abuse that undergirds Other Voices. It is possible that Trilling, in her condemnation of thirty/forty Joel/Capote, actually addresses Cousin Randolph, who forces his nephew—himself in search of a father—to act as Randolph’s “old man.” Rather than continue along these or any other lines, Trilling retreats by granting that “the problem” is “complex” and that “she does not mean to close out all social or personal causality”; she asks only “for some degree of mediation between the extremes of causality and freedom” (232). But what is her suggestion for Joel? How should he resist the “slow piling-up of nightmare detail” and happily embrace genital heterosexuality? (231). The impossibility of a happy heterosexual embrace by Capote’s proto-gay and lesbian characters, coupled with Trilling’s critical conscientiousness, frustrates her into invoking Hitler. If, as L. Trilling writes, “the conscious and unconscious life of liberalism are not always in accord” (Forster xi), then D. Trilling at least recognizes “mixed feelings” in her anecdote (70), a “double…response” in her review (230), instead of merely acting out like Hardwick. Yet though Trilling tries to understand her reaction, she does so by 117 looking at the person who caused it, rather than at herself or her society. I read Trilling’s reaction as follows: This book fascinates yet disgusts me. But instead of then asking Why am I disgusted?, she asks What did the book, and its author, do to disgust me? Her inability to ask the first question not only limits her criticism but may also fragment her memory of the New Haven Railroad, as seen in the temporal confusions discussed at this article’s start. Diana Trilling closes her review by solving the dilemma of how to both retain her humanist values and condemn homosexuality: “were we to ask of fiction, as we once did, that it base its claim to accomplishment on its moral stature, most of the writing we celebrate today would fall into its proper place as no more than a feat of literary athletics” (233). The provocations of Other Voices have been properly placed as senseless grandstanding, and thus dismissed. D. Trilling’s anecdote and review, combined with her husband’s refusal to treat Forster’s homosexuality, exemplify how homosexuality was discounted within progressive movements at mid-century—and Capote’s actions on the train suggest how asserting gay and lesbian identity might offer redress. Capote’s encounter with the Trillings forecasts a change in the relation between literary culture, homophobia, and homosexuality that would eventually contributed to the ascendance of the identitarian politics that have dominated literary criticism for the past two decades. In this respect, Capote wins his argument. By reading the various representations of this meeting and its three characters through different scrims of reportage, we are able to observe the postures, attitudes, and psychologies with which our three characters wage war over the terrain of literature and literary worth in the 118 borderlands where sexuality, humanism, and self-representation abut—and watch as the battle threatens the assumptions on which liberal humanists and their supporters have based their moral worth. We see how major players in the New York intelligentsia that arbitrated literary worth (who makes it and who doesn’t) and “appropriate” criticism (what “counts” and what goes unsaid) are unsettled in their status quo when a volatile iconoclast like Capote refuses certain silences and strategically performs his queer persona in order, if not to crash the train of literary culture, at least to ride its iron horse. Such showmanship served not only as a support for Capote’s career but also as one of the many acts of self-affirmation and articulation that, as the twentieth century progressed, would eventually force a greater freedom of expression and interpretation for homosexuals in literary as well as popular culture. 119 Endnotes for Chapter 2 1 As detailed in Chapter 1, the meeting between Capote and the Trillings almost certainly takes place after his first photo-essay in Life, and before the second photo-essay and the publication of Other Voices, Other Rooms. 2 Irving Howe named the group well after its heyday in the 1968 essay and elegy “The New York Intellectuals.” Though the New York Intellectuals retained the fervent rhetoric and style of their origins in the crucible of the Old Left, the cohort would cease to be ideologically coherent as its members variously reacted to the Cold War, the anticommunist fervor of the 1950s, and the social movements of the 60s. A few, such as Howe, maintained their socialism throughout their life. Many, such as Leslie Fiedler and the Trillings, remained on the left, though wary of the New Left and the radicalisms of the 1960s. Some, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, moved far to the right, provided the intellectual underpinnings of neo-conservatism, and became important figures in the Reagan and George W. Bush administrations. Those more or less associated with the group include Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, Midge Decter, Nathan Glazer, Michael Gold, Clement Greenberg, Elizabeth Hardwick, Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv, Meyer Schapiro, Delmore Schwartz, Susan Sontag, and Edmund Wilson. 3 Lerman and Capote became close at Yaddo in the spring of 1946. Lerman, then an arts writer for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, would come to hold several editorial posts at Condé Nast, including features editor at Vogue and editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. 4 The ambivalence and complexity of Trilling’s thoughts on ethnic identification is evident in his criticism, fiction, and career as editor of The Menorah Journal (1925- 1931). Typically, he begins the four pages of “Under Forty” with “It is never possible for a Jew of my generation to ‘escape’ his Jewish origin” (198), adds “My existence as a Jew is one of the shaping conditions of my temperament” (199), and ends as follows: As the Jewish community now exists, it can give no sustenance to the American artist or intellectual who is born a Jew. And…it has not done so in the past. I know of writers who have used their Jewish experience as the subject of excellent work; I know of no writer in English who has added a micromillimetre to his stature by ‘realizing his Jewishness,’ although I know of some who have curtailed their promise by trying to heighten their Jewish consciousness (201). D. Trilling discusses L. Trilling’s Judaism in terms of his career in “Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia.” 5 Christensen’s “Capote As Gay American Author” offers a useful overview of how Capote’s homosexuality and the homosexual content and themes of his writing have been perceived in academic criticism up until the 1990s (61-66). While Christensen does not directly address Capote’s politics or political impact, he does touch on how Gay Liberation impacted Capote criticism. 120 6 Capote published Music for Chameleons, a collection of short pieces, shortly before his death in 1980. Capote has also had two posthumous publications: the incomplete opus Answered Prayers (1987) and the abandoned early work Summer Crossing (2006), which Capote wrote in 1943, five years before he published Other Voices, Other Rooms. 7 World War II largely eclipsed the active homosexual subcultures and political movements of the 1920s and 30s. The traditional markers for the next phases of the gay and lesbian timeline—the homophile and Gay Rights movements—are the first meetings of the Mattachine Society in 1950 and the Daughters of Bilitis in 1955, and the Stonewall Riots of 1969. These markers are more convenient and traditional than strictly accurate; that said, Capote had no overt connection with any of the nascent homophile groups active in 1946, though he was very much a part of a homosexual community. Cf. Chauncey, Escoffier, and D’Emilio for a history of male gay community and identity. 8 For instance, consider this excerpt from the 1971 Gay Liberation Front Manifesto (London): The present controllers [of the media are] dedicated defenders of things as they stand. Accordingly, the images of people which they transmit in their pictures and words do not subvert, but support society's image of 'normal' man and woman. It follows that we are characterized as scandalous, obscene perverts; as rampant, wild sex-monsters; as pathetic, doomed and compulsive degenerates; while the truth is blanketed under a conspiracy of silence. (318) Much of this applies to Capote’s live televised interviews on, say, The Stanley Siegel Show, which found him an intoxicated, suicidal font of sexual innuendo about a presidential widow and her sister. 9 The mass public, of course, was even less interested in gay and lesbian children than gays and lesbian themselves. Christensen notes that “objections to [Other Voices] on the basis of its intense inferiority may mask antigay prejudices in the sense that the experiences of gay youth are often not of interest to society as a whole” (63). 10 Summers’s positioning of The City and the Pillar as a story of an “ordinary, wholesome young man” forces Summers to discount the end of the novel, when the spurned hero murders his high-school crush” (130). (In Vidal’s 1965 revision, the murder becomes a rape.) Whether Vidal’s gay hero is ordinary and wholesome is questionable; that Vidal successfully decouples effeminacy and homosexuality is not. In Chapter 1, I argue that this decoupling accounts for why The City and the Pillar was received much less favorably than Other Voices, Other Rooms upon publication, when Capote and his hero’s youth and effeminacy made his novel comparably less threatening. Conversely, this decoupling accounts for the higher status of The City among Gay Liberationists invested in the virile, “manly” homosexual. 121 11 Both McCullers and Capote wrote gothic fictions concerned with queer desires and set in a Southern locale. The comparison of McCullers and Capote, which dates from his earliest reviews, stems not only from thematic similarities in their work but also from their common Southern background and her role in introducing him to literary society. The comparison is usually to Capote’s detriment. Typically, Leslie Fiedler notes in 1948 that “The most important writer of this group is Carson McCullers, the most typical Truman Capote”—this group variously standing for homosexual writers, Southern writers, or writers who publish in women’s magazines (Innocence 202). Regardless of the merits of their writing, McCullers, as a woman, was more likely to be welcomed as the writer of such fiction than Capote, who, though an effeminate man, was still a man, and therefore expected to write about “manly” things. 12 “Desire and the Black Masseur” was included in Williams’ One Arm and Other Stories (1948), which was published in a limited edition of 1500 by a small press (New Directions), was not widely reviewed, and was not generally available in plain sight in bookstores but had to be requested from behind the counter. One Arm therefore had a much lower profile than its contemporaries, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1947) and The City and the Pillar (1948), which were both bestsellers. 13 The simultaneous development of the films Capote (2005, based on the Clarke biography) and Infamous (2006, based on the Plimpton oral history) indicate that Capote was a topic of interest for the upper portion of the mass market—or more precisely, for the writers, directors, producers, and investors who determine what subjects are likely to appeal to moviegoers who attend up-market “arty” films with middling budgets and an acclaimed cast. As usual, such twinning was to the detriment of the second film released. Capote had worldwide sales of almost $50 million and an Academy award for Best Actor (Philip Seymour Hoffman), as well as nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Infamous earned receipts just over a million and an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Daniel Craig for Best Supporting Actor. The combined impact of both movies returned the Clarke biography (reissued in 2005) and In Cold Blood to the bestseller lists. 14 In 1950, under the combines stress of unrelieved mourning for the death of his partner, Russell Chaney; the beginnings of an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee that might make Matthiessen's homosexuality as public as his socialist beliefs; the increasing homphobia and anticommunism in the culture at large; and a pre- existing tendency to despair, Matthiessen jumped from a window to his death. Cf. Abelove, Fuller, and Levin. For the 1960 police raid that found Arvin in possession og homosexual erotica and effectively ended his career, cf. DeMott, Martin, and Werth. 15 In Chapter 1, I examine Capote’s early career and argue that his homosexual persona was a complex, effective, and consciously deployed marketing device rather than a hindrance to his career. 122 16 Though the fallacies were first developed in self-titled articles in the ’46 and ‘49 Sewanee Review, they are more clearly articulated in, and often dated from, the revisions included in The Verbal Icon (1954). 17 Cf. “Sex and Science: The Kinsey Report,” L. Trilling’s review of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), for another example of Triling’s distaste for blunt discussions of sexuality, and for his criticism of Kinsey’s finding that, in Trilling’s words, “homosexuality is to be accepted as a form of sexuality like another and that it is as ‘natural’ as heterosexuality” (474). L Trilling’s views on homosexuality would evolve in the 1960s. 18 Haralson’s close reading of the bathing scene in “Thinking about Homosex in Forster and James” bears out Capote’s argument that Forster’s sexuality can be productively brought to bear on his work. By contrast, Jeffrey Heath’s treatment of the “real” in Room avoids Forster’s sexuality, despite its relevance to a reading concerned with the contrast between “spontaneous” and “muddled” responses to life, the last being “what results when people ignore their deepest promptings and respond dishonestly and indirectly to experience as they are expected or told to do” (396). For Lucy, this is not a “second-hand story or painting but…a living man, George Emerson, who kisses her: a real experience she can deny but never forget” (400). 19 Fiedler argues that throughout the history of American literature, pairs of men, frequently of different races, flee from the domesticity and civilized constraints of the world of women. Fiedler reads the unspoken but strongly implied homoerotics as a boyish wish of (male) American writers and readers—a symptom of delayed adolescence along traditional Freudian lines. Another prominent mid-century literary critic who reads homosexuality as a symptom rather than a subject in and of itself is John Aldridge, who argues in 1951 that the presence of homosexuality (and racial conflict) in post–World War II fiction is a response to the exhaustion of the modernist tradition and the need for new means to engage readers. According to Aldridge, writers such as Capote, Vidal, Paul Bowles, and Norman Mailer are not writing about homosexuality per se but rather developing “new subject matter which [had] not been fully exploited in the past and which, therefore, still [had] emotive power” (9). Fiedler’s and Aldridge’s arguments bear witness both to the ability of mid-century critics to discuss homosexuality and the tendency for them to see it as a symptom rather than a subject. 20 This author photo is discussed on pages 65–69. A plot summary of Other Voices is provided on pages 61–62. 21 In Hardwick’s defense, among those who did take homosexuality “seriously” in the l940s were the neo-psychoanalytic schools and hospitals attempting to “cure” it. To put 123 Hardwick in perspective, she neither authorized a medical experiment on a homosexual nor tried to link Other Voices’ “perversion” back to its author. 22 In the 1998 documentary Arguing the World, Diana Trilling recollects the outsider status of women among the New York Intellectuals: “Unless a man in the intellectual community was bent on sexual conquest, he was never intimate with a woman. He wanted to be with the men. They always wanted to huddle in a corner to talk.” Irving Kristol corroborates D. Trilling’s account with an anecdote of sitting down with a plate of party food and being sandwiched by Hannah Arendt, Diana Trilling, and Mary McCarthy, who began an intense discussion about psychoanalysis: “I sat there quiet and terror-stricken. I was a prisoner.” Kristol speaks with a very different tone but nonetheless corroborates male discomfort when engaging in cross-gendered, non- sexualized discussion. 23 Fiedler here references the midcentury reading of homosexuality as a perversion of proper psychosexual development. See Chapter 1. 24 Cf. Trilling's introduction to The Liberal Imagination: It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. And when we approach liberalism in a critical spirit, we shall fail in critical completeness if we do not take into account the value and necessity of its organizational impulse. But at the same time we must understand that organization means delegation, and agencies, and bureaus, and technicians, and that the ideas that can survive delegation, that can be passed on to agencies and bureaus and technicians, incline to be ideas of a certain kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness and modulation and complexity to survive….The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty. (xiv-xv) 25 In her autobiography, D. Trilling heavily details her patronage of psychoanalysis, both as a literary and cultural critic and as an analysand. For mainstream psychoanalytic understandings of male homosexuality at mid-century, see Lewes. Also see Abelove’s chapter “Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans” in Deep Gossip (1-20). 124 Chapter 3: The Apparitional Lesbian Endureth, or Why Has Three Lives Not Been Directly Read in Lesbian Terms? The Apparitional Gertrude Stein A, and perhaps the, primary goal of lesbian rights’ movements for much of the twentieth century was the assertion of the existence of lesbians and female same-sexual desire both historically and at present. While male homosexuality was hypervisible throughout the twentieth century, female homosexuality and its products not only went unseen but also were explicitly denied. Though such denial did serve a protective function, it extracted a damaging ontological cost from proto-lesbians who had to configure and understand (or not configure and understand) their desire in ignorance and isolation. Even when women who desired other women managed to evade censorship and enter the historical or literary record, they went unrecognized, misread, and misunderstood unless the representation was extraordinarily blunt—in which case both history and literature was censored. In 1993, Terry Castle dubbed this phenomenon of unseen and unacknowledged female homosexuality “the apparitional lesbian” and criticized literary scholars for hosting the apparition without setting her a place at the table. Castle asserts that “the lesbian is never with us, it seems, but always somewhere else: in the shadows, in the margins, hidden from history, out of sight, out of mind, a wanderer in the dusk, a lost soul, a tragic mistake, a pale denizen of the night” (2). Castle makes four claims for the apparitional lesbian: she is not a recent invention, not asexual, not a gay man, and not nonsense: She means something (8-14). A “lesbian reading” via Castle is therefore a 125 reading that (1) recognizes the existence of lesbians in literature written before the current cultural formulation of the “lesbian” solidified during the Women’s and Gay Liberation Movements of the 1960s and 1970s, (2) views the sexual desire and practice of these lesbian characters as relevant and possibly fundamental to the text, (3) does not read these characters as gay men, and (4) does not view these character’s sexual identity and desire as incidental to the text but understands them as meaning something. Such “lesbian readings,” which acknowledge and thus solidify the apparitional lesbian, became common as the Feminist and Gay Rights’ Movements of the 70s had a progressively greater impact on academic and mainstream culture. In addition, many scholars who do not share Castle’s perspective or adhere to all her precepts have fought to correct the lack of representation and comprehension of female same-sexual passion in history as well as contemporary culture. One of the least apparitional manifestations of the lesbian before Women’s Liberation was in the work and person of Gertrude Stein. Stein’s role as a lesbian icon is old news, and her claim as the foremost twentieth-century American writer concerned with lesbian sexuality and constructive of lesbian identity is secure. Why then has Stein’s Three Lives (1909)—popular, canonical, and suffused with lesbian content and themes— not been carefully read in Castle’s “lesbian terms?” Three Lives, Stein’s first published fictional work, is a fundamental modernist text usually referenced in undergraduate surveys of modernist literature. The text is composed of three thematically linked but otherwise distinct “lives” of women who, in the exaggerated but telling words of William Carlos Williams, had “no connection whatsoever with the literary past of the language” 126 (274). The heroines are two immigrant German servants (No. 1, Anna, and No. 3, Lena) and an African-American flâneuse (No. 2, Melanctha) who never meet but all live in the small Southern city of Bridgepoint, a thinly disguised Baltimore, Maryland. Each “life” follows its heroine from childhood to death, with pointed attention to work, finances, emotions, and mental states of being. Each “life” feature prominent same-sex passion, and the first, “The Good Anna,” is an explicitly named and dramatized same-sex romance. The representation of lesbian romance, love, and sex is Three Lives requires no interpretation but is repeatedly told and shown. The claim that there has been no Castle- llian “lesbian readings” of Three Lives is not only counterintuitive but also seems contrary to fact, as many, many pages of criticism that acknowledge Stein’s sexuality have been written on Three Lives. Nonetheless, criticism of Three Lives has either (1) focused on stylistic or racial issues exclusively, or (2) has claimed that the lesbian sexuality of Three Lives is encoded in race. 1 But why must race be a code for homosexuality in Three Lives as opposed to both race and homosexuality being subjects in themselves? Stein revised and incorporated parts of her first novel, the lesbian roman-à-clef Q.E.D. (written 1903, pub. 1971), into “Melanctha,” and contemporary critics have theorized in some depth how Stein uses race as a masquerade for homosexuality as she transforms a lesbian romance into a heterosexual romance between African-Americans. Yet the direct representation of female same-sexuality in “Melanctha”—as pointedly dramatized and narrated in the romantic and erotic relationship between Melanctha and her first lover, Jane Harden, which is essential to the plot—has barely received lip service. 2 A restricted reading of 127 “Melanctha” so dominates the critical discussion that criticism of the other two “lives” has languished altogether, and Three Lives itself is rarely viewed as the unified work that Stein conceived and published. And so, almost one hundred years after its initial publication and thirty years after the Women’s and Gay Rights Movements, there has been no comprehensive examination of female same-sexuality in a major work of the foremost lesbian writer of the twentieth century. In the light of Stein’s and Three Lives’ canonical status, as well as the lack of lesbian representation in canonical works, the dearth of comment on the lesbian facts of these “lives” in literary culture strongly suggests that even as I write, in 2008, literary critics are complicit with the still-extant position that lesbian lives are beneath notice. This dearth is not only a political problem but also a scholarly lack, as lesbian lives and themes were certainly in Stein’s mind as she composed Three Lives, and the failure to directly consider them limits our understanding of the text. The constant stream of literary criticism of Stein—much of it brilliant, most of it written by scholars with a comprehensive knowledge of feminism, gay and lesbian studies, and queer theory—puts the ectoplasmic record of the apparitional lesbian in high relief, and allows us to appreciate the strength and subtlety of the homophobia—both externalized and internalized, both intentional and unconscious—that persistently reduces her to a ghost. In this chapter, I examine why such a basic “lesbian reading” of Three Lives does not exist, despite the tremendous amount of attention paid to Stein in the popular and academic press for more than three quarters of a century. 128 First, I substantiate the current dearth of lesbian readings of Three Lives by reading the annotated 2006 Norton edition of the text. I then examine the history of Three Lives’ publication in the light of its status as a lesbian extension of the naturalist project and as the first material trace of Stein’s iconic status as a twentieth-century lesbian writer. To do this, I analyze not only the circumstances around its early publication but also its early reviews in the popular press. Last, I examine how and why the lesbian aspects of Three Lives have been both intentionally and inadvertently obscured and ignored by a literary culture nonetheless happy to acknowledge Stein’s broad queerness and use it is a basis for investigations of her life and art. I do this first by considering how female homosexuality has been read in Stein’s oeuvre, and then by tracing the two traditional rubrics for reading Three Lives—in terms of its place in modernism, and in terms of racial issues. These rubrics, despite their frequent superficial attention to female homosexuality, actually serve to deflect substantive investigation into lesbian content and themes. The next chapter follows this explication of dearth by offering a whole-hearted “lesbian reading” of Three Lives. Three Lives Today The historic blindness of both mass and elite culture to the lesbian content of Three Lives is easily squared with the historic invisibility of the apparitional lesbian, but how can the dearth of lesbian-centered interpretations of Three Lives be coeval with the attention paid to the biographical aspects of Stein’s early work? Scholars have shown that Stein was not only preoccupied with female same-sex passion and relations in her 129 work but also beholden to them for the subject of her earliest creative writing. The early fictional exercises that Stein drafted at college were laden with unspeakable, incomprehensible desires. 3 Q.E.D., her first mature work, offers a fairly direct transcription of Stein’s own unhappy romance with May Bookstaver, who was already fixed in orbit around another woman. This romance, Stein’s first, started in 1900, when Stein, 26, was in her third year of medical school; consumed her for the next two years, which saw her dropping out of medical school and decamping for Europe; saw two more progressively disguised iterations, the 1904 novella Fernhurst and the 1909 “Melanctha” (subtitled “Each One As She May”); and echoed through Stein’s career. Yet consider the recent Norton Critical Edition of Three Lives and Q.E.D. (2006). Norton has based its sizeable market share of critical collations on its authority over the canon and canonical interpretation. The frequent assignment of Norton editions to undergraduates is justified by the series’ assurance on the back cover of each volume that inside is “an authoritative text, contextual and source materials, and a wide range of interpretations—from contemporary perspectives to the most current critical theory.” The Norton Three Lives and Q.E.D. materially links two literary incarnations of the Stein’s affair with Bookstaver—as noted by editor Marianne DeKoven in her introduction, and in footnotes throughout. Yet none of the 22 articles and excerpts that accompany the texts offer more than the slightest consideration of fundamental lesbian issues such as how Q.E.D. and Three Lives suss out the fraught relationship between desire, emotion, and identity when same-sexual desire comes a-calling. Nor do the articles in the Norton edition consider the obscure, difficult, awkward gradations between same-sex friendship, 130 physical loving, and emotional partnership in a society that only validated the first, and barely recognized and demonized the others. Nor does the Norton consider the inverse relationship between the mimesis of the Stein/Bookstaver affair and the acquisition of mass readership, as well as canonical literary merit. Nor does it consider how both external and internalized homophobia shape all the above. Never mind the sophisticated discussion required for consideration of these issues in the unstable terms necessary for a time when “lesbian” as an identitarian category, though hardly nascent, was nonetheless spelled differently than it is today. Even basic biographical information about Stein/Bookstaver and the two texts is offered not much more than a quick gloss in these articles, with the exception of DeKoven’s introduction, and a brief excerpt from Wagner- Martin’s comprehensive biography of the Stein family. Is this cavalier treatment of lesbian textual erotics justified by their presence in such great numbers of Norton critical editions that discussion is superfluous? No. Out of the 110 Norton critical editions extant in 2006, twenty-six of which are classified as “women’s studies,” only Stein and a collection of Adrienne Rich’s writings have overtly lesbian content. Even the usual suspects, such as Radclyffe Hall and Audre Lorde, are absent. 4 Yet presumably Q.E.D.’s role as a precursor for Three Lives is the reason for linking the two texts. So why is the connecting tissue elided? The answer lies not so much in DeKoven’s editorial choices as in a critical lack. Once Stein’s overtly lesbian works were published in the 1970s, consideration of the relationship between her orientation and her writing quickly reached a sophisticated pitch that focused on the ways that Stein “encoded” lesbianism in her texts rather than the lesbianism itself, which was 131 relegated to footnotes and bald statements of fact, the ground rather than the subject. This high pitch has drowned out the complementary sonics of more direct critical assertions of Stein’s sexuality and its impact upon and relation to her writing, as if the lesbian “basics” have been thoroughly “done” and digested—which is not the case. For instance, there is no extended lesbian-centered analysis that traces the parallels that run through all three Lives, despite its complex fugue of tonal, atonal, and chromatic variations on this theme. Instead, vast amounts of critical energy have been spent on how Stein translates her “lesbian themes” into her writing style, and into other identitarian categories, as opposed to what, exactly, is being translated. In this way, the homosexual baby is thrown out, or at least neglected, in favor of the theoretical bathwater. More precisely, the baby is left to drown while the bathwater and basin are scientifically sampled for microscopic traces of the baby’s presence. This preference for searching for the subtle traces of an apparitional lesbian over regarding a more realized presence may result from the enmeshing of the difficulty of Stein’s later writing with her naturalistic portraits of female same-sexuality. Such enmeshing correlates neatly with the power of unconscious homophobia inevitably internalized by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Americans. Any critic (myself included) is foolish to discount the blinders homophobia and misogyny puts on perception and the market constraints that make difficult forthright expositions of lesbian sexuality—problems that cannot easily be approached through wholly intellectual means, which poses structural problems for critics who attempt to hold the lesbian baby solely through academic discourse. 132 Three Lives’ Initial Publication in Literary and Material Context Today, Stein is primarily understood as a modernist figure, and Three Lives is primarily read as a modernist text. Initial reviews of the book, however, linked it to the work of Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and other American naturalists whose generation protested the taboos against sexuality and violence and the glorification of bourgeois individualism present in the work of the Realist writers dominant in Stein’s youth, such as William Dean Howells and the young Henry James. The naturalists’ unsentimental depictions of working-class urban life were purposefully progressive in their expansion of the scope of fiction. Still, none of the American naturalists pushed the boundaries of what could be represented as far as Stein, whose characters are on the fringe of society not only by virtue of ethnicity, poverty and immigrant status but also because of race and, especially, deviant sexuality. American novels such as Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) expanded the ability of sympathetic characters to sexually express themselves outside of marriage, and withheld happy endings and conventionally moral conclusions. The earlier French naturalists did all this and, in addition, wrote at length about female sexuality in terms of broad queerness. For instance, in Madame Bovary (1857), Flaubert shows how Mme. Bovary’s sexual dalliances eventually leave her not only emotionally cold but also, as her lassitude progresses, materially cold through suicide. Still, no naturalist deviates as far off the heterosexual axis as Stein does while relating the lesbian and otherwise queer passions of Three Lives and the earlier Q.E.D. and Fernhurst. 133 The American naturalists’ questioning of hegemonic proprieties often made initial success and even publication elusive. Many naturalist works skirted the edge of respectability, and the novels of French naturalists of a generation before—authors such as Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola from whom the American naturalists took some of their cue—were frequently banned in the United States, where they were synonymous with “dirty books.” Many particularly risky naturalist works had to be self-published, such as Maggie, or were dropped by the publisher upon their first publication and did not sell, such as Sister Carrie. The even-less-acceptable lesbian content of Q.E.D. and Fernhurst made them unpublishable, though Stein did try. Stein tried even harder to publish Three Lives, but three years of effort and the help of several literary agents and well-connected friends failed to sell the manuscript. Stein finally saw print on July 30, 1909 when Three Lives was published by Grafton, a vanity press. Vanity presses earlier in the century were not as redolent of publication for self-gratification as they are now, and the term “vanity press,” with its negative connotations, only dates from 1969 (OED). The publication cost Stein $660— approximately $14,050 in 2006 figures, an enormous amount for a woman on a small, fixed income who spent much of it on experimental art. The contract called for an edition of 1,000 copies, half to be bound, half awaiting demand. 5 Stein’s interest in her sales, marketing, and public image was constant, but she could not afford to properly promote Three Lives. Review copies were sent to newspapers, but the publicity budget extended to a single ad in Stein’s hometown of Baltimore. Nonetheless, when Three Lives came out, Stein subscribed to a clipping 134 service, later subscribed to more, and kept subscribing until shortly before her death. Despite Stein’s reputation as an iconoclast, she was willing to compromise for worldly success. When Grafton’s president, Frederick H. Hitchcock, suggested in a letter of January 16, 1909, that Stein increase sales by changing the title from the “much too formal” Three Histories, she did, though she refused to standardize her grammar or make other textual changes (Gallup 43). In a letter of April 9 of that year, Hitchcock also suggests that Stein add a subtitle, and for many years and editions, “Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha, and the Gentle Lena” was featured on title pages and spines (43). The whimsy of this subtitling, which frames Three Lives as a legend or fairy tale, serves to soften and “feminize” the book, as did the switch from Histories to Lives—though note that the title was not softened ever further to a direct translation of Flaubert’s Trois Contes, or Three Tales, which Stein had used as a model. Stein’s distinction between the external surface and inner content—of her material texts, public image, and person—and her compromise of one but not the other recurs throughout her career. The Grafton Press was a reputable vanity press, but its charter did not allow for much editorial discretion. A representative sampling of Grafton’s catalog previous to Three Lives might include The Threefold Path to Peace, a metaphysical exploration by Xena, who follows her or his name with a Greek delta (1904); Sergeant Francis Nicholls of Stratford, Connecticut, 1639, and the Descendants of his Son, Caleb Nicholls (1909), and The Tories of Chippeny Hill, Connecticut: A Brief Account of the Loyalists of Bristol, Plymouth and Harwinton, who Founded St. Matthew's Church in East Plymouth in 1791 (1909). 6 Even in this context, Hitchcock found it incumbent to warn Stein that she had 135 “written a very peculiar book and it will be a hard thing to make people take it seriously,” but there was nothing in the material appearance of the book to signal Hitchcock’s unease (Flowers 44). Grafton books typically had a physical appearance that corresponded with the author’s investment—and $660 didn’t buy Stein the stylized illustrations and art deco font afforded by, say, the lavish program for the 1905 Importer’s Automobile Salon, Motor Goose Rhymes for Motor-Ganders. Nor did Three Lives sport the gilt edges of John Roger Williams’s A Handbook of Princeton (1905) or William L. Chaffin’s A Biographical History of Robert Randall and His Descendants 1608-1909 (1909). Yet Hitchcock did well by Stein. Vanity press books tend to look either markedly better or worse than books published by a press that hopes to recoup an investment, but Grafton’s Three Lives has a respectable binding (dark blue linen over boards, lettered in gilt) and size (7 1/2 by 5 inches). None of 3 Lives’ reviews denigrate or even mention its press or binding—which was not true of Stein’s next published volume, Tender Buttons, put out by Marie Claire in 1914. Marie Claire was not a vanity press, but the June 7 New York City Call sniffed at this “publisher of books for people of ‘exotic tastes,’” and carefully noted the material surface of this “slim little book bound in bright canary covers” before panning its content. By contrast, Three Lives’ sober appearance and Grafton’s reputation as a press primarily concerned with history and genealogies suited Stein’s project of exploring subterranean levels of consciousness—more commonly conducted at this time in the social sciences, as echoed in the original title Three Histories, redolent of the case history and study, a whiff doubtlessly intended by Stein, well-schooled in such odor by her study of and publication 136 in cognitive psychology, and just as certainly subverted by Hitchcock, who in a letter of April 9, 1909, suggested the change of title because he didn’t want the book confused with “real historical publication” (Flowers 43). In fact, Stein may have agreed to the subtitle because locutions such as “The Good Anna” and “Melanctha” adumbrate the case study, with its standard locution of a first name, sometimes modified by a single adjective, such as Freud’s “Little Hans.” 7 Hitchcock arranged for jacket blurbs from Stein’s friends, radical journalist Hutchins Hapgood and his wife, Neith Boyce, a Progressive-era writer and prominent proto-modernist. (Boyce did not, however, write the introduction that Hitchcock wanted.) These blurbs went some way towards fulfilling Hitchcock’s suggestion in the same letter that “it would help the book a good deal if we came out openly and stated your ideas and why you have written the book in the way that you have” (Flowers 44). Stein followed Hitchcock’s advice throughout her career, first using proxies such as Mabel Dodge, Carl Van Vechten, and Sherwood Anderson as interpreters, and then by copiously explaining herself, both in print and in public lectures. Initial Responses to Three Lives Historically, the critical conversation about Stein in general and Three Lives in particular grew in direct proportion to the buzz around Stein herself, which echoed between high and low culture as her fame increased. Stein’s unusual authorial persona quickly became legible as broadly queer to the mass public, and as specifically lesbian to readers primed for such readings by subcultural knowledge or by the intuition sparked by 137 personal desires. Only the very first critical readings of Three Lives are uninflected by her fame. Though the instructive, reassuring blurbs and sensible surface of Three Lives seem to have cushioned it from the dismissal and ridicule Hitchcock feared, no dust jacket could shield the text from recognitions of strangeness. Contemporary reviews register Stein’s challenge to sexual, racial, and class hegemony, though this registration comes more through a recognition of the strangeness of the text than a direct apprehension of its politics. Contemporary reviews do not, however, register the female same-sex passion at the heart of Three Lives. Instead they echo Hitchcock’s observation that Stein had “written a very peculiar book” (letter of 4.9.09, Flowers 44). Three Lives is a “peculiar exposition” with an “originality of…narrative form” by “a literary artist of such originality,” a “new and original artist in the field of fiction” whose “style is somewhat unusual” and who uses a “most eccentric and difficult form” (Washington Herald; Kansas City Star 5; Star; Star; Boston Evening Globe). Witness here the spoor of the apparitional lesbian. Stein’s first three appearances in the popular press—in the Sunday, December 12, 1909, Washington [D. C.] Herald, and the following Sunday’s Kansas City Star and Boston Globe—serve as a template for Three Lives’ initial reception. Though all three brief, unsigned reviews mark the text as peculiar, original, unusual, and odd, not only the noteworthy attributes of this peculiarity but also the perceived merits and demerits of this peculiarity differ by venue. The Washington Herald notes that Stein departs from “the method of the great masters” by eschewing a “statement of ultimate and fixed condition” 138 and offering instead “a detailed showing of the repeated showing of the repeated thoughts in the brain by which such conditions are arrived at”—a description of Stein’s method and goals that still holds true today. Though the Herald does infer that Stein’s method is less masterful than tradition’s—a metaphor freighted with race, class, and gender that puts Stein on the wrong end of the barge—primary criticism is reserved for her choice of heroines. Though “such repetition does occur, even in cultivated and brilliant minds…it is a question if the mind-working of such persons as Miss Stein has chosen could be made interesting by any process whatsoever.” In other words, Stein’s methodology may be strange and unfortunate, but her work’s primary fault lies with her choice of subject: “If she could attempt the same things with minds of a higher caliber, the result might be more entertaining.” 8 Again, the deciding flaw of the work is Stein’s choice to illuminate “minds of low caliber and meager cultivation, the three lives depicted being those of three servant women, one of whom is a mulatto.” The Herald does not speculate that Stein might be a servant or mulatto, for authorship is incommensurable with “minds of lower caliber and meager cultivation.” Stein goes over better in Boston, where the author and her method are explicitly linked: “The author, Gertrude Stein, has given expression to her own temperament, to her own way of seeing the world.” Though the Globe doesn’t compliment Stein’s method (which means, in Boston, her person), neither does it unfavorably compare her to “the masters.” Like the Herald, the Globe proves capable of seeing through Stein’s style to focus upon her subject: “It is only when one has read the book slowly—not as a story, but as a serious picture of life—that one grasps the author’s conception of her humble 139 character[s], their thought and their tragedies.” Here, Stein’s class address is recognized but not demonized, as it is in the Herald. The Globe not only acknowledges the peculiarity of Stein’s method but also passes aesthetic judgment upon it. Three Lives is “difficult,” “somewhat unusual,” “a little difficult to follow,” and “sometimes…becomes prosy.” Stein does best in Kansas City, and the Star’s review is a touchstone of Stein biographies. 9 Here, Stein’s peculiar method is not only observed as in Washington and positively judged as in Boston but also recommended within precise limits—limits of the audience, rather than the work, for Three Lives is “A fiction which no one who reads it can ever forget, but a book for a strictly limited audience….As a character study one can speak of it only in superlatives.” The Star asks the purpose of Stein’s methodology and attempts to describe its utility: “In this remarkable book one watches humanity groping in the mists of existence…As these humble human lives are groping in bewilderment so does the story telling itself [sic].” In the Star, as in the Washington Herald, Stein’s transcription of increments of consciousness is judged as accurate—but only Kansas City commends this accuracy: the style “makes of the book a very masterpiece of realism, for the reader never escapes from the atmosphere of those lives, so subtly is the incantation wrought in these seeming simple pages.” The precision of Kansas City’s delineation continues in terms of class. The Star characterizes the heroines of Three Lives past their flat definition by race and gender in the Herald—“three servant women, one of whom is a mulatto”—and compliments Stein’s ability to cross classes: “The indwelling spirit of it all is a sweet enlightened 140 sympathy, an unsleeping sense of humor, and an expansive carefulness in detail.” Here, there is neither the conflation of Stein the person with her style that we find in Boston nor the disapproval we find in Washington, D. C. Instead, there is appreciation of “this remarkable book,” “this very masterpiece of realism.” Yet the Star does not quarrel with the Herald and the Globe over the strangeness of both the artist and her work; the disagreement is over the merit of the peculiarity, not the peculiarity itself. There are five reviews of Three Lives in 1909 and fourteen in 1910 10 —and then none till 1913, when Stein’s association with the Armory Show, the art exhibition that earned an enormous amount of attention in both the popular and the arts press, sparked interest in Stein as a figure and an artist. 11 With the exception of a review in The Nation, which was the last to appear, these initial 19 reviews appeared in regional but important newspapers at a time when the press was less nationalized than now. As the periodicals were neither nationally distributed nor integral to literary culture (except for The Nation), the reviewers were probably unaware of each other’s work, and so the considerable similarity of the nineteen initial reviews testify to a common vision that extends past the usual plagiarism of lazy reviewers. Furthermore, though all nineteen periodicals are situated in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (except for two in Chicago), this common locale does not equal the regional bias that it would today, as in 1909, these areas were more diverse, and held a greater percentage of the nation’s population. 12 In addition, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic had a much larger impact on the nation’s intellectual life than the still-disproportionate amount they do today—which makes the reviews’ verdict even more conclusive. We are therefore assured of a purity of response that would soon be 141 adulterated by Stein’s personal notoriety—and the heterogeneity of these publications promise that similar responses independently rose in a variety of American publics. In short, these nineteen reviews are as unbiased by Stein’s public image as any ever were or are likely to be. And what they see and relate is peculiarity. Some reviews are more detailed, but none substantially differ in terms of focus, tone, or content, and none read the text as specifically sexually queer. A lesbian conclusion can only be reached by appreciating how Stein in some reviews is placed as “other” by race, class, and gender, and then by extrapolating from these patches of queerness a broader quilt of difference: an iffy journey of common cause. Apprehensions of a numinous strangeness do permeate these reviews, but this noumena never resolves. This lack of lesbian resolution is typical of both mass-market and literary criticism at a time when the only lesbians in print were apparitional, and these early reviews of Stein illustrate how looking for readings that acknowledge female homoeroticism and overt homosexuality is like tracking a ghost. Note that the enrobement of same-sex passion and other forms of sexual queerness in reviews of Three Lives in a sticky, more generalized “peculiarity” is not equivalent to the “strangeness” seen in reviews of Other Voices, Other Rooms. Consider the denotation and connotation of peculiar as opposed to those of young, effeminate, strange, and esoteric, the code words used by the press to connote Capote’s sexual dissidence. The Oxford English Dictionary defines peculiar as “distinguished in nature, character, or attributes; unlike others; special, remarkable; distinctive” and peculiarity as “the quality of being peculiar to an individual person or thing.” The 1911 Encyclopedia 142 Britannica, still regarded as the single greatest edition of any English-language encyclopedia, and certainly the most definitive general compilation of public knowledge at the start of the twentieth century, defines peculiar as “a word now generally used in the sense of that which solely or exclusively belongs to, or is particularly characteristic, of an individual; hence strange, odd, queer” (36). This single queer (as opposed to the constant wink of Capote’s reviews) is the sole touchstone of sexual oddness in the penumbra around the definition of peculiarity. This penumbra is bereft of the subcultures referenced by esoteric and effeminate, both of which offer an established social formation—in the case of the first, a secret known only to initiates, and in the case of the second, a gender variance similar to other such variances in the second. Peculiar, by contrast, is strictly limited to the individual. Similarly, original, unusual, odd and eccentric conveyed the singular in 1910, and still do today. There is no community here, no sense of a human trait that any reviewer has previously seen, read, or heard. In addition to “peculiarity” and other signs of the apparitional lesbian, initial reviews of Three Lives contain another precursor to future criticism: a focus on the second part of Three Lives, “Melanctha.” “Melanctha” is (1) the most unusual “life” in terms of its heroine, a mixed-race, promiscuous, psychologically complex wanderer; (2) the most experimental “life” in terms of its style, a historic incorporation of pictorial developments in modernism into written form through its unusually stylized vocabulary, extended repetitions, and concentration on the vagaries of consciousness; (3) the most biographically notable “life” in terms of subject, as it transmutes the affair between Stein and May Bookstaver into the relationship between Jeff and Melanctha; (4) the most 143 biographically notable in terms of composition, as “Melanctha” was partially written as Stein posed for her portrait by Picasso, beneath Matisse’s portrait of his wife; (5) the most exciting “life,” with considerably more sex, drugs, violence, and death than the other two; and (6) the longest of the three “lives,” as well as the last written. These merits tends to obscure the psychosexual foundation upon which “Melanctha” rests, and to allow for the easy circumlocution of the homosexuality of the story and its characters. The large number of pages written about “Melanctha,” which dwarfs the critical commentary on “Anna” and “Lena” combined, has not corrected this lapse. Furthermore, the strong critical focus on “Melanctha” make it impossible to give a critical history of Three Lives without reinstating the dominance of “Melanctha.” This invariably warps the understanding of Three Lives, which was conceived and published as a unified work in three parts, as was Q.E.D., which also has three named parts. Three Lesbian Registers Broadly speaking, literary critics have read three “lesbian registers” in Stein’s oeuvre: (1) the direct reference of same-sexuality through naturalistic representation and lyric erotica, (2) the encoding of lesbianism into style, race, and class, and (3) the impact of Stein’s subject position, which includes her sexuality, upon her writing. In addition to the naturalistic representation of female same-sex passion in Q.E.D. and Fernhurst, Stein also wrote lyric lesbian erotica, such as Lifting Belly (written 1915), which like most of Stein’s sexually explicit work was not published until after her death in 1946. 13 Stein’s reputation for obscurity is at odds with the focus and bluntness of such work. 144 That said, Stein’s work is often obscure. This obscurity is often interpreted as a necessary camouflage for smuggling lesbian content into the public arena. According to this rubric, Stein’s obscurity may resolve into crystalline focus when viewed through the decoder ring of lesbian sexuality. As Shari Benstock writes, “Stein’s language renders meaning if one is familiar with its essentially lesbian code…Once the code is broken, meaning spills out” (Women 161). From the perspective of this second, “encoding” rubric, Stein’s obscurity is her means, not her object, as Catherine Stimpson notes when she finds that Stein consistently “takes certain lesbian or quasi-lesbian experiences and progressively disguises and encodes them in a series of books”—an act which “distances the representation of homosexuality from its enactment in life” (“Mind” 498). Critics have paid particular attention to linguistic cryptography, as in the titular pun of Tender Buttons, and the translation of lesbianism into other registers of identity, such as race, nationality, and class, as in the claim that Stein transposes Q.E.D.’s lesbian affair into a heterosexual relationship between two African-Americans of different classes in “Melanctha.” Stein’s third lesbian rubric traces neither Stein’s direct nor disguised relation of same-sex passion through her writing but rather how her writing (and more broadly, her consciousness) was determined by her subject position as not only a lesbian but also a Jewish, financially-independent, expatriate woman—all attributes that were viewed with deep suspicion when Stein wrote. The second and third rubrics are often marbled, as in the following argument by Marianne DeKoven: Stein simultaneously concealed and encoded in her literary work feelings about herself as a woman, about women’s helplessness, and particularly about 145 lesbianism….Stein’s rebellion was channeled from content to linguistic structure itself, [which is] much easier to ignore or misconstrue, but its attack, particularly in literature, penetrates far deeper, to the very structures which determine, within a particular culture, what can be thought. (Different 331) Here, Stein’s translation of queer sexuality into linguistic and identitarian codes is equated with the relationship of her subject position and her art Criticism of Stein has reached such a pitch of sophistication that much of the twenty-first-century conversation is, if not dismissive, then largely disinterested in Stein’s direct denotation and simple signification of the lesbian, in both her writing and public persona. Much Stein criticism is unconcerned with Stein’s sexuality, or if concerned, is uncomfortable with a lesbian label. Early critics may be oblivious to what now seems obvious; cognizant but silent due to hostility to lesbian content; sympathetic but willfully blind to support Stein’s reputation and shield her from homophobia; or see Stein’s sexuality as irrelevant to her art—all of which may be progressive positions in homophobic times. 14 More recent critics may find the lesbian vein subordinate to questions of gender; worthy of recognition like any other biographical fact but mined out and not particularly interesting; or even if interested, may wish to explore the freedom afforded by previous excavations to explore other aspects of Stein’s work. Furthermore, queer theorists may find the category of lesbian reductive or believe that the connections between Stein’s own sexuality and the sexual content of her work need to be explored on a broader canvas. Last, the generic conventions of academic writing—in particular, the positioning of the writer as a brilliant detective who uncovers hidden truth and limns delicate distinctions—also work to discourage such “basic” work. Stein’s blunt 146 dramatization and narration of same-sex passion, as well as her most obvious encodings, are therefore noted then passed over, overlooked for the very obviousness that causes their ramifications to shimmy out of sight, as they have since initial publication. Instead, critics have read Three Lives in terms of modernism and in terms of race. Three Lives in Terms of Modernism and in Terms of Race Stein became known among the cognoscenti much more through her and her brother’s art collection, connoisseurship, and salons than through the 1909 publication of Three Lives. By 1910, she had become enough of an art celebrity and Paris “character” to attract stray bits of popular press; a puff piece in the New York Press (which had not reviewed Three Lives) profiles Stein as an authoress “launched” by a “little coterie of old friends,” a “familiar figure in the Latin Quarter” who was “one of the first to discover great merit in that revolutionary and eccentric painter, Henri Matisse” (“Zolaesque” 2:1). Two years later, in August, 1912, Stein’s association with pictorial modernism and the “art crowd” was extended to the rarified readership of Alfred Steiglitz’s Camera Work through her word portraits “Picasso” and “Matisse,” published in an issue devoted to the subjects. Stein’s own “A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Coronia” was privately printed that same year and became notorious enough in the art world to serve as the climax, complete with extensive quotes, of “La Grande Fête Americaine,” a satire of Paris café society in the March 22 Saturday Evening Post of the next year. 15 March, 1913, was also the publication date of “Speculations, or Post- Impressionists in Prose,” Mabel Dodge’s article on Stein, which, in an impressive bit of 147 logrolling, was sprinkled with quotes from “A Portrait,” itself published at Dodge’s expense. Dodge’s article served as the climax of a special issue of the high-end periodical Arts and Decoration; the issue itself was advance publicity for the Armory Show, and was available at the show itself, which ran for a month from February through March. The Armory Show was a notorious success that pervaded both high and low cultural conversations, a beachhead for the dominance of visual modernism—via Matisse, Duchamp, and Picasso—as both the highest, most sensuous, most intellectual chic and the lowest, most decadent, most dangerous and nonsensical bugaboo. Stein’s persona was vastly inflated through the powerful bellows of the show; she became the “literary cubist,” the “high priestess” of modernism—an association cemented by Tender Buttons, published the next year to at least 37 notices, most with sensational copy for this “nightmare journey in unknown and uncharted seas” (Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 June 1914). The backwash from all this celebrity flowed back to Three Lives, which was reviewed in a modernist light by periodicals that ignored it upon its initial publication. For instance, the April 10, 1915, Philadelphia Public Ledger warns that “the blur which this futurist in writing at first creates cannot be cleared until we are willing to bring the thought and intelligence to its interpretation which we needed when examining The Nude Descending the Stairs.” We see here a logic where the mass public requires a visual analogue to interpret the writing, a formulation that will recur throughout Stein’s career, as the broadly queer and specifically lesbian content of her writing are signaled by the subcultural connotations of her authorial persona. 148 Stein’s celebration lasted and grew as Three Lives’ first printing sold out under its Grafton, John Lane, and Bodley Head imprints; as Albert and Charles Boni reprinted the novel in the United States in 1927; and as the Modern Library reissued and repackaged Three Lives in 1933, blessing it and Stein with an early kiss of the canon. This trajectory made it inevitable for most criticism of Three Lives in its first fifty years of published existence to focus on its association with modernism—a critical focus that dictated a close focus on “Melanctha,” the most stylistically experimental “life.” If modernism (and less precisely in terms of the mass public, the avant-garde) was and is the dominant lens used public to examine “Melanctha,” then race is the second prescription for the critical gaze. From the very first, criticism of Three Lives took noted the novelty of a “mulatto” point of view. Initially, Stein’s assumption of an African- American milieu and dialect found public approval in literary African-American circles. Stein’s great friend, the Harlem arts booster Carl Van Vechten, shared with her praise of Three Lives from members of the Harlem Renaissance. For instance, in 1927 Van Vechten reported that the writer Nella Larsen found “Melanctha” “the best Negro story she has ever read”—praise that Van Vechten himself qualifies by parenthetically adding that “(she is Negro herself)” (Letters 147). 16 Van Vechten’s assumption that Larsen’s own race heightens her judgment of the representation of race (an assumption that elides Larsen’s biraciality) is echoed by Larsen herself, who writes Stein the following year to wonder “just why you and not some one of us should so accurately have caught the spirit of this race of mine” (Flowers 216). 17 Five years later, in 1933, Van Vechten transcribes similar praise from James Weldon 149 Johnson, who found “Melanctha” marvelous. What surprises me is that in it Gertrude Stein is the first (I believe I’m right) white writer to write a story of love between a Negro man and woman and deal with them as normal members of the human family. Her style, which on the surface seems so naive—some might say childish, is really consummate artistry. (Flowers 281-282) The utility of the good opinions of both Van Vechten, who set himself up as an advance- man-at-large for the Harlem Renaissance, and Stein, who often performed similar services for young writers, calls into question the sincerity of such praise. (Larsen, for instance, enclosed her first novel, Quicksand (1928), with her compliment.) In addition, the same-sex passions of Three Lives may have predisposed queer writers of the Harlem Renaissance (as well as Van Vechten) towards Stein. Such writers include Larsen, whose second novel, Passing, has considerable same-sex passion, and Wallace Thurman, whose novel Infants of Spring (1932) situates Stein in a gallery of gay and lesbian role models composed by the homosexual character Paul Arbian, himself based on another queer Renaissance writer, Bruce Nugent, whose work shows the strong influence of Stein. Nonetheless, positive reactions to “Melanctha” in the Harlem Renaissance can be balanced with that of the peripatetic Jamaican writer Claude McKay, who found “Melanctha” to have nothing striking and important about Negro life. Melanctha, the mulattress, might have been a Jewess. And the mulatto Jeff Campbell—he is not typical of mulattoes I have known anywhere. He reminds me more of a type of white lover described by a colored woman. (Brinnin 121) 18 Praise for “Melanctha” from African-American authors extends at least to the 1940s and somewhat unexpectedly to Richard Wright, a figure usually associated with a politics that postdate those of the Harlem Renaissance. In “Gertrude Stein’s Story is Drenched in 150 Hitler’s Horrors,” a 1946 review of Stein’s Wars I Have Seen in P. M. magazine, Wright asks “why do I, a Negro, read the allegedly unreadable books of Gertrude Stein,” and proceeds to detail how after a chance encounter as a child with Three Lives, “my ears were opened for the first time” to the vividness and artistic value of African-American dialect (15). 19 In contrast to this warm reception, mainstream reviewers—almost certainly white—who found Three Lives offensive in general often found the choice of an African-American heroine and milieu in “Melanctha” its worst impropriety. The double vision of race and modernism shapes the historical discussion of lesbianism in “Melanctha,” as these modes of perception were much more available and speakable than one centered on sexuality. The traditional invisibility of lesbianism, coupled with the censorship of those who could see it and speak it, not only kept blunt discussion of same-sexual connotations out of both critical and mass cultural discourse, but also cloaked the clear denotations of female same-sex passion in “Anna” and “Melanctha.” Yet even such dense, traditional veiling couldn’t have hidden the lesbian erotics of Q.E.D. and the morphing of its lovers into a heterosexual couple: such eschewals were midwifed by Stein’s “forgetting” of Q.E.D. until The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933), where she mentions this neglect, thus circuitously alerting the reader to the novel’s existence. 20 Nonetheless, as Q.E.D. itself went unpublished until 1950, access to the transformation of the lovers in Q.E.D. to the lovers in “Melanctha” was severely limited. Discussion of the lesbian origins of “Melanctha” and the lesbian erotics of Three Lives in general was therefore restricted to (1) those who were close enough to Stein to have read 151 Q.E.D. before she hid the text, (2) those who knew details of Stein’s personal life and could apply it to her work, or (3) those who were willing and able to read overt signs of same-sex passion in the text, an ability usually nurtured by their own dissident sexuality or subcultural knowledge. 21 Stein’s brother Leo offers the unusual perspective of a heterosexual man who was aware of Stein’s sexuality, familiar with Q.E.D., aesthetically sophisticated, and unsympathetic to his sister as both a lesbian and a writer. The Steins lived together in Paris from 1903-13, but parted never to speak again due to the double pressure of Gertrude’s success as a writer and her life as a practicing lesbian. Both pressures were augmented by Alice Toklas, who met Stein in 1907 and moved in with the siblings in 1909. A year after G. Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and soared to great fame, L. Stein wrote that I read the first novel which she says that she had completely forgotten, and thought the stuff was interesting—it was the original material of Melanctha and had nothing to do with Negroes—the writing was impossible….This brings to mind the fact that a very intelligent Negro writer…said to me once that Gertrude was the only white person who had given real Negro psychology. I laughed and said, of course, the book was really not about Negroes and had only Negro local color, and as the psychology of whites and Negroes of the same cultural grade is essentially the same, the extra psychology will give Negro psychology, provided he understands that cultural group. (Letter to Mabel Weeks, 6 Feb. 1934, Journey 137) L. Stein notes that Q.E.D. serves as a rough draft for parts of “Melanctha” and disagrees with the racialized essentialism that led early critics, both within and without the African- American community, to compliment Stein on her representation of “real” blackness. For L. Stein, “the psychology of whites and Negroes of the same cultural grade is essentially the same” (137). L. Stein does not, however, mention, and much less discuss, 152 either the lesbian erotics and conflicts of Q.E.D. or how those erotics and conflicts inform “Melanctha.” All he says is that the novel’s subject is “interesting”—a synonym to the “peculiar” of Three Lives’ early reviews. Nor does he discuss how the substitution of black heterosexuals for white lesbians affects the content of the text, if at all. For that matter, L. Stein feels that the race of the characters is incidental—that class, or “cultural grade,” determines character. L. Stein notes the lesbian origins of the text but does not discuss them, much less take them seriously. He notes the substitution, but does not link the substitution to its origin—a preference still extant in Stein criticism. 22 L. Stein’s letter was private; the public discussion of lesbianism and G. Stein grew apace with the publication of the lesbian particulars of her biography and with the publication of Q.E.D. For instance, in the 1951 New Yorker review of Things As They Are (the slightly-censored version of Q.E.D., finally published in a tiny print run of 516 in 1950), Edmund Wilson observes that the vagueness that began to blur [Stein’s writing] from about 1910 on and the masking by unexplained metaphors that later made it seem opaque, though partly the result of an effort to emulate modern painting, were partly also due to a need imposed by the problem of writing about relationships between women of a kind that the standards of that era would not have allowed her to describe more explicitly. 23 (109) Wilson, who had previously written a chapter on Stein in Axel’s Castle (1931), here makes the “coding” argument that figures in so much Stein criticism, and implicitly ties the encoding to Stein’s modernist stylistics. Wilson’s public discussion of Stein’s lesbianism is highly unusual; most lesbian-inflected critique will need to wait until Brinnin’s 1958 biography and, especially, the further revelations of biographers Bridgman (1970) and Mellow (1974), who offer the biographical particulars and textual 153 histories that allow a population blind, dumb, afraid of, or unsympathetic to lesbian erotics to make such analyses. 24 Nonetheless, these biographers did not always apply this biography to Stein’s writing, though the connection has seemed so obvious to later writers that these biographers, like other early Stein critics, have frequently been given credit without proper collateral. Consider how Corrine Blackmer credits Leo Stein with an early proffer of how “Melanctha” was a “racially encoded reworking of his sister’s unpublished autobiographical novel” (233 n. 6), though, as we have seen, L. Stein neither believes that “Melanctha” has been “racially encoded” nor mentions anything about Q.E.D.—not even its name, much less its lesbian content—besides the fact that it is unpublished. A similar misapprehension is made by Canadian lesbian novelist Jane Rule, best known for the novel Desert of Hearts (1964), later filmed as Desert Hearts (1985). Rule’s book Lesbian Images (1975), written for the lay lesbian rather than the academic community, does considerably more lesbian-specific textual analysis on Three Lives in eleven pages on Stein’s life than Bridgman and Mellow combined. 25 Nonetheless, Rule credits Bridgman with the idea that Stein’s style evolves to disguise her lesbianism. She quotes this passage from Bridgman: “By selecting general nouns and verbs and replacing nouns with pronouns that lacked distinct referent and if possible, gender—‘one’ and ‘some’— she moved steadily toward abstraction” (Bridgman 57). To Rule, this move towards abstraction is coeval with closeting—but Bridgman does not directly state that sexuality is why Stein sought “a means of making a statement without exposing herself” (57). I 154 belabor this point to show how easily lesbian erotics slips out of direct discussion, whether elided (as with L. Stein and Bridgman) or assumed (as with Rule and Blackmer). Bridgman’s diffuse use of sexuality as an interpretative model can be productively paired with his incisiveness in terms of race. Bridgman’s 1961 article “Melanctha” is the first extended objection in literary culture to the racism of Stein’s text. Bridgman’s Stein biography, which incorporates the article, notes that “Melanctha” “is the grudging tribute most critics pay to the endurance of Gertrude Stein’s reputation…It appears to be a work of social naturalism, and better still, it treats the Negro not only sympathetically, but as if he were white” (52). Bridgman disagrees both with tribute and the sympathy; he argues that “Melanctha” is “only an early waystation on Stein’s road to artistic maturity” and that “Stein’s treatment of the Negro is both condescending and false.…the principals of [“Melanctha”] are not black at all, but only new, revised [racist] versions of the characters Gertrude Stein had described in Things As They Are” (52). Yet Bridgman makes no mention of lesbian sexuality to “Melanctha,” apart from a brief mention of Jane and Melanctha’s “sexual overtones” (56)—and when Bridgman examines the link between Q.E.D. and “Melanctha,” he carefully denatures both the specific sexuality and the ramifications of its translation. For Bridgman, lesbian erotics are abstract “forces”: Provided names, the forces are Jeff Campbell, a Negro physician who while attending a sick woman, falls in love with the woman’s daughter Melanctha. Their earlier names were [Q.E.D.’s] Adele and Helen… (53) 155 In its historical context, Bridgman’s equation of same- and different-sex passion is progressive. Nonetheless, the apparitional lesbian, though introduced, is excluded from the conversation. Even when the Lesbian Movement does push the apparitional lesbian into the conversation, the talk remains superficial, fixed on her dress. The 1970s finds responses to “Melanctha” atomized, as lesbian-centered critics interpret Stein’s use of race only in terms of lesbian coding. For instance, Stimpson’s much-cited essay “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein” (1977) offers a detailed chart of direct quotations of Q.E.D. in “Melanctha”—material proof of the apparitional lesbian. Stimpson discusses how the female same-sex passion of the first is masculinized in the second, and how “problematic passion among whites is transferred to blacks, as if they might embody that which the dominant culture feared” (501). Yet what is coded is not discussed past its name, as seen in Stimpson’s elision of Melanctha’s love relation with Jane, which goes undiscussed, and in Stimpson’s backpedaling caution at the article’s end that “one must wonder if future scholars will not ask about us, ‘Why were they so interested in sexuality? What did the fascination with sexuality itself encode, disguise, and hide?” (506). Stimpson’s interest is literally in name only. Stimpson sets the tone for the next decade, and throughout the 1980s, feminist critics of “Melanctha” forsake the directly lesbian components of the text. Some acknowledge them briefly and move on. 26 Others ignore the lesbian aspects of the text completely, such as Sonia Saldívar-Hull, who takes to task feminist critics who excuse Stein’s racism and classism due to Stein’s importance to feminism. Though the article 156 participates in the larger move in feminism towards recognizing the different experiences of women, Saldívar-Hull does not extend this move to female same-sexuality, which is entirely absent from the essay. Such lapses are addressed in the 1990s by the demand of Shari Benstock and others that critics acknowledge modernism’s lesbian aspects and “redefine the erotic in relation to the sources for all art” (“Expatriate” 183). Speaking for the lesbian community, Benstock claims that “we are suspicious of postmodernism’s embrace of Sapphic literary celebrations or angered at modernist definitions that exclude lesbian writers who dares speak the name of Sapphic love rather than cloak the Sapphic text in a style a la mode” (196-7). Benstock traces how Stein’s work was not “spurred by purely intellectual concerns…[but] were responses to Sapphic impulses that she first concealed and later celebrated.” 27 Benstock’s call for attention to what she names “sapphist modernism” is addressed in terms of “Melanctha” by Corrine Blackmer, whose 1993 essay builds upon Stimpson and others who “interpreted the novella’s racial text solely in terms of its palimpsestic lesbian subtext” while addressing the racist charges put forth most forcefully by Saldívar-Hull (233). 28 Blackmer reconciles both the racism of “Melanctha” and its importance as a lesbian text by asking why Stein should be held accountable for the sins of the hegemony that only allows her to represent the lesbian through a racialized drag: Thus Jews become types of blacks, lesbians become types of mulattas, and prostitutes, women, bohemians, and even cosmopolitans. Literary artists from these groups who seek cultural legitimacy must stress their sameness with a highly suspicious dominant discourse, while they simultaneously endeavor to express their rapport with an often equally suspicious minority discourse….blame for miscommunication devolves upon those among the marginalized who attempt 157 to be heard and attempt to gain access to an otherwise closed system, rather than upon those in the dominant discourse whose power enables them to remain oblivious to their rhetorical duplicity. (239-40) Yet Blackmer fails to explain why, in a text with such copious expressions of same- sexuality, Stein necessarily uses race as a masquerade for sexuality in the first place. Blackmer, almost alone among critics of “Melanctha,” does more than note Melanctha and Jane’s relationship; she actually examines how “Melanctha leaves Jane once she gains equal power with her lover,” and how Melanctha views their relationship as “a stage…to ‘pass’ through on the way to heterosexual adulthood”—a perspective that points to an “fundamental impasse” in Melanctha’s character (247). For Blackmer, Melanctha can neither imagine a non-tutelary relationship with a woman as “adult” nor have a long-term relationship based on structurally unequal power—a relationship that she does not achieve with Jeff or any other man. In reading Melanctha’s relationship with Jane as a “stage,” Blackmer buys into normative Freudian psychosexual construction at the cost of ignoring Melanctha’s marked decline after the end of her relationship with Jane; in all three “lives,” Stein refutes the Freudian model of progressive psychosexual stages. Nonetheless, Blackmer is one of the very few critics to read Jeff through Jane, or even treat them both on somewhat equal ground. Blackmer’s use of “lover” in terms of Jane and Melanctha’s relationship—a basic show of respect offered by no other critic treated here—is a striking moment of visibility. 29 This overview of the understanding of lesbian translation through race illustrates how much more work is done on such questions of translation than on the direct study of same-sex passion in “Melanctha” and the rest of Three Lives. Many of the above critics 158 could accurately claim that I have taken them out of context: that their primary objective is to discuss race and “Melanctha”; that lesbian utility aside, the experience of reading “Melanctha” today remains undeniably irredeemably racist; and that the sexuality of the “Life” and its author is besides their point. Which is my own point—that the lesbian contents of “Melanctha” are neglected in favor of their encoding. And so the apparitional lesbian endureth. Three Lives has fallen into an abyss between historic closeting and exuberant searching, and basic exploration of its lesbian content has always been either in the future when scholars had the freedom to do such work, or in the past when “basic” texts were first explored. The absence of lesbian- centered study of the most canonical work of the most iconic lesbian writer of the twentieth century speaks for itself. 159 Endnotes for Chapter 3 1 See Blackmer (233, n. 6) and Hovey (546, n. 2) for comprehensive histories of the critical linkages between race, sexuality, and “Melanctha.” 2 For instance, one of the most thorough treatments of Jane/Melanctha is by Karin Cope, who offers three sentences in Passionate Collaborations (2005) that summarize both the affair and its relation to the primary love affair in Q. E. D. (Cope 104). Cope’s focus here is on commonalities between Stein’s and Picasso’s primitivism, not Jane and Melanctha, and I mention her book not to criticize a lack but to offer a suggestion of how Jane/Melanctha is either ignored or written about as if it’s already been covered in such depth that it can be summed up in three sentences. 3 Stein’s earliest stories and other exercises in fiction are not in print and can only be read in the Stein collection at the Beinecke library. There have been no extended analyses of this work, though several biographers have taken brief notice on its triple preoccupations with sexual awakening, hidden communications, and nameless dread. 4 Many Norton editions do contain female same-sex passion and lesbian thematics under the obscuring aegis of the apparitional lesbian. There is also some overtly lesbian content in the Norton Anthology of Women’s Literature (1996), and a spattering in other Norton anthologies. 5 All were eventually bound. 300 of the copies were purchased in 1915 by John Lane, and issued that year in the United States by the John Lane Company, and in Great Britain by Bodley Head. 6 Grafton did publish the early work of at least one other fiction writer who achieved a national reputation: Stark Young’s poetry collection The Blind Man at the Window and verse drama Guenevere, both out in 1906. Stark, often included on lists of queer writers, was a prominent New Agrarian, a drama critic for the New Republic (where he would review Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts on March 7, 1934), and the author of the best-selling So Red the Rose (1934), the foremost Southern novel before it was overshadowed two years later by Gone With The Wind. 7 For discussion of Three Lives in light of Stein’s medical and psychological studies, and in terms of the history of the case study, cf. English 98–114. 8 In their ready comprehension, these reviews disprove one of the prime objections of potential publishers of Three Lives. For instance, Pitts Duffield of Duffield & Co., which had published Boyce and Hapgood, found the book “too unconventional, for one thing, and if I may say so, too literary. Where one person would be interested in your application of French methods to American low life, a hundred, ignorant of any sense of 160 literary values, would see only another piece of realism; and realism nowadays doesn’t go” (Flowers 34). Yet the majority of reviews do agree that part of the value of the text is its application of naturalism to its particular subject, though the estimation of that value is frequently negative 9 Biographer James Mellow writes that this was Stein’s favorite review of Three Lives (148). 10 The sixteen reviewers after the Star, Globe and Herald, are, in 1909, the Chicago Daily Herald, Philadelphia Public Ledger, New York Sun, Rochester Post Express, and Chicago Record-Herald, and in 1910, the Springfield Union, Philadelphia North American, Philadelphia Public Ledger, Brooklyn Eagle, Cleveland Plain Dealer, New York Post (a different publication than today’s), Philadelphia Book Note, Pittsburgh Post, Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Boston Transcript, New York Press, and the Nation. 11 Stein had a small reputation as a collector and critic of modern art before 1913, but her association with the Armory Show in particular and modernism in general was cemented by Mabel Dodge, whose “Speculation, or Post-Impressionism in Prose” claimed that Stein was translated the modernist visual aesthetic into prose. “Speculation, or Post-Impressionism in Prose” appeared in the March 1913 Arts and Decoration, which served as the unofficial program of the Show, and was reprinted in the June issue of Alfred Steiglitz’s Camera Work. Stein’s public persona is the subject of Chapter 5. 12 The 1910 census found that 28% of the population was in the Northeast and Mid- Atlantic, vs. 19% in the 2000 census. 13 For instance, a censored Q. E. D. was published in 1950 as Things as They Are, and the full text along with Fernhurst in 1971; Lifting Belly was published to rousing critical silence in a 1953 collection, and in its own right in 1995. 14 Stein criticism is a vast archipelago, and attitudes to her and her work’s sexuality may vary considerably over the course of a single critic’s career, which further complicates the critical landscape. One early critic who employs a large variety of strategies for dealing/not dealing with Stein’s sexuality is Donald Sutherland, who strikes a careful, conscious, and unavoidably awkward balance. For example, his 1951 Gertrude Stein: A Biography of Her Work discusses the transmutation of the women in Q. E. D. to the heterosexual couple in “Melanctha” without mentioning that Q. E. D.’s women are sexually involved, or why, precisely, Q. E. D.’s “expressive power…is limited by its very propriety to the subject matter” (qtd in Three Lives, ed. DeKoven, 281). Readers both attuned to and disturbed by homosexuality can read what they like. 15 All works in this paragraph are discussed in greater depth in Chapter 5. 161 16 Van Vechten paid Stein the compliment of having Alma Love, the heroine of his Nigger Heaven (1926), directly quote by memory (for more than a page and a half!) a conversation between Jeff and Melanctha that foreshadows Alma’s own romantic troubles—a quoting that illustrates not only how much authority Van Vechten gave Stein’s racial portrait but also how confident he was his African-American heroine would view Stein’ portrait as authoritative (57-58). 17 In “African Masks and the Arts of Passing in Gertrude Stein’s ‘Melanctha’ and Nella Larsen’s Passing,” Corinne Blackmer argues convincingly that Stein and “Melanctha” have a strong influence on Larsen and her second novel, Passing (1929). 18 McKay’s quote is reported by Brinnin in The Third Rose. Though this quotation is frequently referenced, Brinnin offers no notes, and I have not been able to trace the reference. McKay does have a documented history of protesting the insinuation of hypersexuality upon people of color, beginning in 1920, when as a writer for the Worker’s Dreadnought, a British socialist newspaper, he protested “Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine,” an article by E. D. Morel in The Daily Herald [London]. McKay’s objection to “Melanctha” corresponds with his protest of Morel. McKay himself was criticized by DuBois and others in the African- American literary community for the explicit sexuality of his best-known work, the novel Home to Harlem (1928). 19 Wright validated his appreciation by reading “Melanctha” to a “group of semi-literate Negro stockworkers,” who were “enthralled”—an enthrallment that might result from Wright, the reader, as much as from Stein, the writer. Also see Wright’s “Why I Chose ‘Melanctha’ in I Wish I’d Written That, ed. Whit Burnett (1946). Wright, who lived in Paris in the 40s and met Stein, would go on to contribute a dust-jacket blurb to Stein’s Brewsie and Willy (1946). 20 Stein critics have made a convincing case that Q. E. D. was buried because of Alice Toklas’s jealousy of Bookstaver, which led Toklas to burn some of the Stein-Bookstaver correspondence, and which inflects Stein’s forgetting in The Autobiography, both in terms of Stein’s assumption of Toklas’s voice, and in terms of Toklas’s role as Stein’s typist. 21 Overt examples of lesbianism in Three Lives are the focus of Chapter 5. 22 Cf. Michael North’s The Dialect of Modernism (1998). 23 Michael Hoffmann claims that Wilson wrote the “first essay to deal directly with lesbianism in Stein’s work”—which is true in terms of wide circulation and general audience (12). 162 24 Brinnin mentions Q. E. D. in terms of Three Lives only as an earlier example of the “behavioristic conception of character” (61), while Mellow restricts himself to a bare mention of how Adele and Helen in Q. E. D. are recast as Jeff and Melanctha in Three Lives, and then quickly moves on: “Gertrude’s interest in her two Negro characters is in the passionate nature of their involvement—their love affair, which reenacts, in heterosexual terms, the Lesbian affair between Adele and Helen in Q.E.D” (73). Bridgman’s view is discussed later in this chapter. 25 Also see Dolores Klaich’s Woman +Woman: Attitudes toward Lesbianism (1974) for a more lesbian-centered interpretation of Stein’s early works (primarily Q. E. D.) from the mid-70s. 26 For example, Lisa Ruddick, on her way to the subject of “‘Melanctha’ and the Psychology of William James,” briefly finds that Stein’s assertion of African-American inattention is racist—a racism that helps Stein tell a lesbian story. 27 Unfortunately, Benstock never extends her analysis to Three Lives, though she does include a chapter on Stein in her overview of Sapphist modernists, Women of the Left Bank (1986). 28 Blackmer makes a opposite move with Larsen’s Passing, correcting those who “have overlooked issues of same-sex desire and have interpreted Passing as a text concerned solely with heterosexual jealousy and issues of racial identity and solidarity” (233). 29 A more recent response to Benstock’s call in terms of Three Lives comes from Jamie Hovey’s “Sapphic Primitivism in Gertrude Stein’s Q.E.D” (1999). Hovey attempts to reconcile critical perspectives primarily concerned with race and sexuality, primarily through the scientific discourses that Hovey argues constructed both for Stein. Hovey dubs the use of race to signify sexual difference “sapphic primitivism,” which “celebrates a ‘foreign’ sexuality as dark, other, earthy, and outside bourgeois codes [but] invokes the whiteness, wealth, and bourgeois respectability of the lesbian body in order to demand [a] niche for the polymorphously perverse woman” (549). Though Hovey is concerned with “the role race and lesbian desire plays in rendering the polymorphously female subject intelligible” (556), and specifies that “both Q. E. D. and ‘Melanctha’ suggest that the experience of love itself produces other ways of knowing” (556), her primary focus is on the translation of this way of knowing by race and class, rather than on what this way of knowing is—a focus that allows only a minimal examination of Melanctha and Jane’s affair. Other critics who have touched on “Melanctha” since 1990 include Marianne DeKoven, who in Rich and Strange discusses how Stein’s repeated passages of crude racial stereotyping have been largely overlooked by the academic community, but who doesn’t address lesbian thematics; Michael North and Aldon Nielsen, who don’t discuss homosexuality in Stein’s work; and Barbara Will, who looks at Stein as a specifically 163 Jewish writer, which productively inflects the consideration of Stein’s representation of race. 164 Chapter Four: Three Lesbian Lives A Map of Same-Sex Passion Ghost Map In the previous chapter, I asked why the enormous body of comment on Three Lives does not include a lesbian reading, when Stein is one of if not the most prominent lesbian writer of the Twentieth-Century United States, when female same-sexuality (both overt and covert) pervades the text, and when the need for lesbian readings of canonical work has been and remains great. I answered this question in terms of homophobia, the apparitional lesbian, the material history of Three Lives, and the historical particulars of Stein criticism in both academia and the popular press. With these contextual challenges to a lesbian reading of Three Lives identified and addressed, I now offer a reading of Three Lives as a naturalist portrait of three proto-lesbians: women who don’t identify as lesbians but nonetheless have same-sex orientations. I read Three Lives as a palimpsest, three overlaying portraits of proto-lesbians in a small Southern city at the turn of the twentieth century. In “The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena,” Stein offers case studies of three working-class proto-lesbians whose same-sex orientation is neither consciously realized nor sexually embodied, to their detriment. Three Lives is a spectral map of same-sex passion, a rendering of three amorous paths that do not lead to lesbian sex, much less lesbian identity, though the paths are so firmly situated in the country of lesbian desire that there is nowhere else for them to “go,” as this chapter will show. In this way, Three Live is not only a map of same-sex passion but also a map of lesbian loss, and the lesbian lost. 165 Three Lives may be a ghost map, but it is nonetheless a realistic rendering of women whose primary emotional and sexual tendencies are demonstrably same-sexual, but who are prevented by homophobic historical circumstances from realizing (much less acting upon) their desires, or from valuing them if they do experience them. The text’s depiction of its characters’ psychological states through a repetitive, nonlinear style—at a time when such a style was not yet a modernist commonplace—designates the text a modernist landmark. In addition, the text’s repudiation of linear form—of complication, rising tension, climax, and resolution—also marks it as modernist. Nonetheless, the three “lives” of Three Lives is just as correctly viewed as an extension of the realist project to depict characters and subjects that had not heretofore been considered appropriate literary subjects and, through this exposure, to act as an agent of social criticism and as an incitement for change. I will show that for all three heroines, Stein offers ample evidence of both same- sex desire and the internalized homophobia that hides and thwarts this desire. Through these three proto-lesbians, Stein offers three degrees of ghostliness: Lena, the most spectral; Anna, who can only materialize as a sexless spinster; and Melanctha, the most sexually substantial but ultimately still apparitional lesbian. All three heroines sit near the bottom of the economic, racial, and ethnic pecking order, where most opportunities for self-expression, personal freedom, and privacy are extremely circumscribed. 1 These constraints are so strong that Anna and Lena neither have sexual relations with another woman nor consciously experience sexual pleasure or desire. Their epithets prevent them 166 from removing the prefix proto before lesbian: they are too much the good Anna and the gentle Lena. Anna, the first heroine, channels her erotics into an idealized romance with another woman and dies a virgin. This allows Anna to both experience and act upon her lesbian desire while denying its sexual aspect. If we stipulate that psychological stability is the ability to effectively act in the world in an orderly, regular, definitive fashion, as well as the ability to successfully repress the parts of oneself that do not fit one’s self-image, then Anna is the most psychologically stable of the heroines. This stability comes at the cost of either a conscious or an embodied sexuality, and demands the rigorous and inhumane enforcement of proper sex roles and sexual behavior in others as well as herself. Lena, the last heroine, is the most damaged of the three. Lena can barely retain a coherent ego, much less either conceptualize or act upon her desires. Her sexuality can only be understood in terms of her fragmentation, for her only experience of desire, will, and pleasure comes in a same-sexual context, while active heterosexuality effectively kills her. Melanctha, the middle heroine, is the most psychosexually evolved of the three heroines, and therefore the most unstable in heterosexual terms. 2 She struggles to understand and to express herself sexually, and to understand how her society prevents her and others from achieving this understanding and this expression. Melanctha is conventionally understood as sexually fluid, or bisexual, though her same-sex experience has earned much less critical attention than her heterosexual encounters. In this chapter, I offer a different reading of Melanctha and configure her as a proto-lesbian whose partial success at self-realization means that her story cannot not be told transparently by Stein, 167 who is trying to publish her work within a society where the practice of female same- sexuality was considered to be perverse and immoral, and where the public, naturalist, and named (sometimes) representation of lesbian experiences and concerns were restricted to femme fatales and thwarted spinsters, as in Gautier, Balzac, Zola, and Henry James. This chapter therefore reads Three Lives as a tripartite, unhappy portrait of proto- lesbians, lesbians who either can’t realize themselves as such or be represented as such: Anna, the woman who does not conceive of herself as lesbian but whose same-sexual passions are the most vibrant part of her life; Melanctha, the woman who struggles to achieve a consciousness and embodiment of same-sexuality, and whose success may either signify a fluid bisexuality or an embodied lesbianism whose representation must be cloaked in heterosexuality to published; and Lena, the woman who has been so destroyed that her proto-lesbian self can only be seen in the wreckage that remains. A logical objection to this reading may be that I am reading what I want to read rather than what the text supports. After all, I am conducting a lesbian reading of a text with two heroines who never have sex with other women, and a third whose lesbian sex has received much, much less attention than her sex with men. Isn’t my reading, like other readings that claim un-specifically-stated sexual orientations for texts and characters, suspiciously indirect and extended? 3 Such readings may indeed require complex and bold arguments, but these are demanded by the practical constraints of publishing lesbian material in the literary marketplace of 1909. A lesbian reading of Three Lives is also supported by Stein’s transparent depictions of lesbian sexuality and identity in her two 168 previous—and necessarily unpublished—novels, Q.E.D. (written 1903) and Fernhurst (written 1904), neither of which saw light until after Stein’s death. 4 A lesbian reading of Three Lives is further supported by Stein’s personal history preceding and during the book’s composition. Three Lives in a Lesbian Context: Gertrude Stein Comes of Age In 1895, Gertrude Stein was a twenty-one-year-old sophomore at Radcliffe College interested in philosophy and psychology, which were then closely linked. Her older brother Leo, her most intimate relative, was at Harvard, and the Steins had a close- knit circle of primarily Jewish friends. Radcliffe was an unusually welcoming environment for a smart, stubborn, heavy Jewish girl without “feminine charm” or conventional good looks, and Stein earned excellent grades and special notice from many of her professors, including George Santayana and, especially, William James, who were both fundamental to the burgeoning study of consciousness. She also began to write fiction. 5 By all accounts, Stein at twenty-one was a virgin who had not yet had any sexual encounters with anyone else, either male or female, though she was exposed to the constant pressure—acute in Jewish families—for women her age to be married. Due to her date of birth, Stein was extraordinarily exposed to the dangers of and punishments for homosexuality, and frequently read about them and heard them discussed, as did an unprecedented number of Americans. For 1895 was the year of the Oscar Wilde trial, a 169 media event of enormous proportions that made the previously unspeakable speakable and permanently changed the public discourse of homosexuality. Wilde had been a mass-market celebrity in the United States since 1882, when Richard D’Oyly Carte, the impresario who backed Gilbert & Sullivan, booked Wilde on a nationwide tour, hoping not only that Wilde would succeed in his own right but also for symbiotic marketing between Wilde and a national tour of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, which began its Broadway run in 1881. Patience satirized Aestheticism in general and, as Wilde grew more and more famous, was understood to satirize Wilde in particular. Wilde’s tour won enormous press and success at a time when such tours had the cultural prominence of rock concerts today, and ran for three separate rounds through the United States and Canada from January to October, usually with twenty or more stops a month, usually with two lectures a stop, for a grand total of 140 lectures in 260 days. Wilde’s fame was therefore truly nationwide, as he was heavily covered in the local press of his many, many destinations. In 1890, Wilde published The Portrait of Dorian Gray in serial form, and as a book in 1891 in both England and the United States to enormous attention, which was heightened by the one-two-three-four punch of successful London runs of his plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Each play earned more critical praise and public applause than the one before, and each was heavily covered in the American press. Wilde brought his American fame to yet another level by his hubristic prosecution of his lover’s father for libel for leaving a calling card “for the sodomnite 170 [sic] Oscar Wilde.” Wilde lost his suit, and was subsequently prosecuted for public indecency. Together, the trials lasted from April 3 to May 25, 1895, as Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest—his greatest hit—played to sold-out crowds. The entire affair must have made it clear to Stein—then an impressionable twenty-one years old—and everyone else who read the newspapers that even private displays of homosexuality, once publicly known, had the power to put even rich, powerful celebrities not only in jail but also sentenced to two years of hard labor breaking rocks. Though public reactions to male and female homosexuality cannot be conflated, Stein still had ample reason to fear the consequences of her own same-sexed desire. In Wars I Have Seen, Stein writes of her realization that she was not “free,” but that her homosexuality, as well as her Jewishness, constrained her, and put her at risk: There is not doubt that every one really want to be free, at least to feel free, they may like to give orders or even to take them, but they like to feel free, oh yes they do like to feel free, and so Oscar Wilde and the Ballad of Reading Gaol was the first thing that made me realize that it could happen, being in prison. And then the next thing was the Dreyfus affair, that is anti-semitism. 6 (55) Linda Wagner-Martin reports that Stein writes in her journals that she was “very afraid” when she read “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), Wilde’s poem about the death penalty inspired by the hanging of a man he had met in prison, and thematically concerned with the union of love, guilt, and inappropriate behavior (“Questions” 260). 7 Perhaps due in no small part to this danger, there is no record of Stein engaging in sexual relations in college, though Stein’s great fame makes it unusually likely that such acts would be known, and though there was an appreciable culture of female same-sex passion in many of the women’s colleges of the time, including Radcliffe. 171 Stein did not come of lesbian age until 1900, when, as a twenty-six-year-old in her third year in medical school at Johns Hopkins, she had an affair with May Bookstaver. Bookstaver was already in a relationship with an older woman who supported her, Mabel Weeks, whom Stein also knew. 8 Stein’s interest in medicine, which had already begun to suffer due to the increased prosecution that she faced as a woman and a Jew at Hopkins and in Baltimore at large, dissipated entirely under the pressure of the complicated affair, and in 1901, Stein dropped out of school and decamped to Europe, where the affair finally ended in 1902. 9 After some wandering, Stein collated her thoughts and feelings on the affair in 1903, when she wrote Q.E.D., a fairly direct transcription of Stein’s sexual and identitarian awakening in the context of her, Bookstaver, and Weeks’s triangular relation whose title references the stable, if unhappy, construction of the triangle. (Q.E.D. — quod erat demonstratum, Latin for which was to be demonstrated—in Stein’s day announced the end of a mathematical proof of a previously-stated claim: in this case, the stability of the unhappy lesbian triangle.) In 1904, Stein remixed the affair in the novella Fernhurst, which grafted her personal story to a well-known scandal at a woman’s college of an affair between a married lecturer and another professor who was the subordinate partner in a lesbian relationship with a president of the school. And so, by the time Stein wrote her third version of the affair in Three Lives’ “Melanctha” (subtitled “Each One as She May”), she had already completed two undisguised chronicles of lesbian self-realization and love: chronicles that therefore had little chance of being published. Stein’s desire for publication required a heterosexual disguise for this latest 172 iteration of her preoccupation with female same-sex passion and identity. As Chapter 3 illustrated, the history of critical readings of Three Lives, and their focus on the heterosexual relationship between Melanctha and Jeff, indicates how well Stein’s disguise worked. Stein’s personal and academic history prepared her for her tripartite portrait of the plight of fin-de-siècle Baltimore lesbians in three separate ways. As an undergraduate, Stein was a favorite student of psychologist William James. She attached herself to his laboratory, and with a graduate student, Leon M. Solomons, conducted original research which she published in the prestigious Psychological Review (“Normal Motor Automatism,” 1896; “Cultivated Motor Automatism; A Study of Character in Its Relation to Attention,” 1898.) 10 Though she did not do well in her medical school coursework at Johns Hopkins, she was an excellent research assistant, thanked repeatedly by Llewellys F. Barker in The Nervous System and Its Constituent Neurones (1899), a fundamental work of neuroscience. Stein herself wrote a scientific article on brain embryology that was championed by Barker and tentatively accepted by the American Journal of Anatomy pursuant to revisions that Stein never made. She was extraordinarily well versed in the scientific method of looking at brains and behavior. At the same time, Stein’s own personal experience of acting on her physical attractions to women allowed her a first-hand, subjective understanding of lesbian psychosexual development. By 1907, the year after Stein wrote Three Lives, she had established a lesbian relationship with Alice Toklas—an establishment that was possibly aided by Stein’s delineation of three proto-lesbians in Three Lives who, unlike Stein, remain in Bridgepoint/ Baltimore, 173 and who, also unlike Stein, never lose their proto prefix. Last, when Stein began to write Three Lives (1905) she had been writing naturalist, “scientific” portraits of same- sexuality and lesbian psychosexual construction for several years, in Q.E.D. and Fernhurst. In short, Stein had transferred her studies from medicine to the study of the manifestation and understanding of female same-sex passion. Stein’s original title for Three Lives was Three Histories, and she only changed it when the president of The Grafton Press, worried that the title would both discourage fiction readers and “get confused with [his] real publications,” suggested the new title in a letter of January 16, 1909 (Flowers 43). Both titles suggest an affinity with the literature of the case study, which Stein had been schooled in, and within which case studies were often referenced as “case histories,” or “histories,” or “lives.” In her own three “lives,” Stein explores the three primary options for working-class proto-lesbians in turn-of-the-century Baltimore. Anna takes the hard bargain of trading lesbian sexual expression and self-consciousness for hegemonic security; Melanctha makes the harder bargain of achieving sexual embodiment and identity at the cost of social and intimate censure (a censure that also requires Stein’s translation of this achievement into heterosexual terms); and Lena lacks the wherewithal for any bargain at all, due to the havoc and fragmentation that homophobia has wrought on her proto-lesbian self. 174 “The Good Anna” and the Hard Bargain In the first of the three “lives,” “The Good Anna,” Stein creates a lesbian character who has a “great romance” with another woman but unconsciously denies herself direct sexual expression for the sake of power, respect, and security. In hegemonic terms, Anna deserves her adjective: she is “good.” She knows her place as a poor, female, Catholic immigrant servant in Baltimore at the turn of the twentieth century and almost never acts, or even consciously thinks, inappropriately. Instead, Anna acts as a soldier of propriety, waging war against others who fail to meet her own high standards. In a brilliant (if unconscious) move against her subordinate position, Anna pursues her role with such extraordinary vigor and vehemence that she accrues an impressive amount of worldly power, finds considerable outlets for her aggression, and manages a same-sex romance. She does this at the hard bargain of forsaking self-consciousness and sexual expression, as well as working herself to death and retaining a servant’s sensibility even after she owns property and runs a business in her own right. “The Good Anna” is in three parts, like Three Lives itself. “Part 1” is a non-linear portrait of Anna at the time in her life when her “goodness” is most fully realized: when she is a housekeeper for Miss Matilda, bargaining hard with shopkeepers; badgering her employer, underservants, and pets; and probably estranged from her romantic partner, Mrs. Lehnten, who is conspicuously absent. Anna breaks with Lehnten comes during her employment with Miss Mathilda, and while it’s unclear whether the women’s romance is over by the time Stein snaps Anna’s portrait, the failure of the romance and the ensuing total repression of Anna’s lesbian love suits Part 1’s definitive portrait of the “good” 175 Anna at her “best.” The second part, “The Life of the Good Anna,” tells the linear story of Anna’s life as a servant from her entry into service as a seventeen-year-old maid in Germany through her emigration to Bridgepoint, a small Southern city, and her employment by three masters: Miss Mary, Dr. Shonjen, and Anna’s favorite, Miss Mathilda. (Bridgepoint is an analogue for the Baltimore where Stein lived in 1892 and from 1897-1901, and Miss Mathilda, with her impracticality, large size, European travel, and penchant for buying art instead of clothes, is a portrait of Stein herself.) Stein also relates Anna’s personal life: Anna’s romance with the midwife Mrs. Lehnten, Anna’s friendship with the housewife Mrs. Drehten, and Anna’s encounters with the Lehnten and Drehten families. Part III, “The Death of the Good Anna” is also linear, and takes up Anna’s life after Miss Mathilda moves to Europe, leaving Anna her house and its furnishings. Anna opens a boardinghouse but abandons her financial shrewdness, acting like a servant instead of a businesswoman, charging too little and working too much until she dies from the cumulative effects of sustained overwork. Transferred from Normandy to Baltimore, updated from the start to the end of the nineteenth century, and constructed around lesbian desire, “The Good Anna” is essentially the story of Flaubert’s “Un Coeur Simple,” usually translated as “A Simple Heart” or “A Simple Soul.” 11 “Un Coeur Simple” is the first part of Flaubert’s last complete work, Trois Contes [Three Tales], published to great critical praise and middling sales in 1877. Trois Contes was still respected and influential among the Parisian artists and writers among whom Stein moved in 1905-6, when she wrote Three Lives. Stein planned a translation but instead wrote a loose adaptation. 176 Both “Un Coeur Simple” and “The Good Anna” are the first of three connected stories and are based in part on memories of each author’s past servant: Flaubert’s nurse, Caroline “Julie” Herbert, and Stein’s Baltimore servant, Lena Lebender. Though some critics have found the citations of “Un Coeur Simple” and the tripartite structure of Trois Contes as nothing more than good form for an author writing in Paris in the first decade of the 1900s, the parallels move beyond form to content. 12 Like “The Good Anna,” “Un Coeur Simple” is a biography of a devoted housekeeper, cook, and maid-of-all-work that primarily focuses on her working life. Furthermore, both heroines are remarkably free of conventional romance and eros yet lead lives of vibrant passion and love. The unusual configuration of this passionate love as well as the difference between Flaubert’s and Stein’s style have disguised these similarities for many readers. Before the action of “Un Coeur Simple,” Flaubert fixes Félicité in a normative sexual matrix: “like other girls, she had once fallen in love” (5). Yet teen Félicité vehemently resists the consummation of this love, and after her fiancée deserts her to marry an older woman who can have him excused from military service, Félicité lacks desire along traditional heterosexual romantic lines. Years later, while traveling, her guide references the rich, older woman for whom Félicité was dumped: In the town center of Toucques, for instance, as they were passing alongside a house with nasturtiums growing around the windows, he said, with a shrug of his shoulders, “There’s a Madame Lehoussais lives there and, rather than take a young man…” Félicité did not hear the rest, for the horses had broken into a trot and the donkey had run on ahead. They turned down a track, a gate swung open, two young farmhands appeared and they all dismounted by the manure-heap right outside the front door of the farmhouse” [ellipsis Flaubert] (11). 177 Félicité, who knows that her fiancé left her for an older woman named Lehoussais, fails to ask either for clarification or the rest of this unclear anecdote, which is cradled in precise, material specifics, as if to underline its murkiness. For didn’t Mme. Lehoussais take the young man from Félicité, and from the army? What does rather signify? The reader knows that Félicité’s fiancé and Lehoussais took each other in marriage rather than have the fiancé join the military, but this reading is not syntactically possible with the anecdote, which is no clearer in French. 13 Neither Félicité nor any other character, including the narrator, references either Lehoussais or the fiancé again. Flaubert, famous for his precision, aims for the reader to have a “private,” and thus more powerful, revelation: Félicité is so little interested in her previous romance that she is less aware of it than her reader. Félicité’s only other remotely conventional romance is with a Polish soldier who “even said he would like to marry her, but they had a serious argument when she came back one morning from the angelus to find him ensconced in her kitchen, calmly helping himself to a salad which she had prepared for lunch” (28). This is the entirety of Félicité’s Polish romance, subordinate to a larger paragraph about her kindness to the Polish regiment and to cholera victims, itself part of a detailed list of her attachments, most of which fill a full paragraph, and some of which occupy pages. In this context, Félicité’s sole heterosexual romance as an adult woman is decidedly minor—and decidedly subordinate to her role as a proper servant, as revealed by the salad fracas. Yet Félicité does not seem to have abandoned heterosexuality per se. Instead, her same-sex 178 relations are part of a broader queerness that to our knowledge never coalesces around genital sexuality of any kind. Félicité’s cathexis fluidly skips from her fiancée to her mistress’s children, her nephew, her mistress, the Polish regiment, a dying old man with a tumor who lives in a pigsty, her pet, and divinity, ranging across class, gender, species, and beyond, at story’s end, when Félicité’s love skips from her live parrot to its stuffed corpse to its conflation with the holy ghost. While some critics have interpreted “Un Coeur Simple” as, in the words of Flaubert biographer Geoffrey Wall, “the intimate history of a love that never found its object” (xix), Flaubert himself explicitly conceived of this plurality of objects, though not with the same frame of reference as authors who wrote after the dawn of psychoanalysis. In an introduction to Trois Contes, Flaubert writes that “Un Coeur Simple” is quite simply the tale of the obscure life of a poor country girl….One after the other she loves a man, her mistress’s children, a nephew, an old man she nurses, then her parrot; when the parrot dies she has it stuffed, and when she is on her deathbed she takes the parrot for the Holy Ghost. It is no way ironic (though you might suppose it to be so) but on the contrary very serious and sad. (Oeuvres Completes 15:458) Félicité’s idealization and devotion are not conventionally romantic, and any specifically sexual desire is undetectable. Nonetheless, both the intensity of Félicité’s feeling and the way it frequently wells up around keepsakes of the beloved—material keepsakes that she sensually beholds and worships—gives her passions a palpable though inchoate sexual aspect. Here is Félicité watching her young charge Virginie at the girl’s first communion: Even from a distance, she could recognize her beloved little Virginie by the delicate line of her neck….Félicité leant further forwards so that she could see her and, with that singular imagination that is born of true love, she felt she was 179 herself Virginie, assuming her expression, wearing her dress and with her heart beating inside her breast. As Virginie opened her mouth, Félicité closed her eyes and almost fainted. The next morning, bright and early, Félicité went to the sacristy and asked to be given communion. She received it with due reverence but did not experience that same rapture. (16) Without Virginie, communion just doesn’t have that same kick. Félicité’s idealization and identification with the little girl are precise definitions of the projection of an internal object upon another person—a projection that usually signifies romantic love at its most idealized. The physicality of Virginie and her relics transports Félicité even after the little girl’s death, when Félicité and her mistress go through the little girl’s things: They found a little chestnut-colored hat made of long-piled plush, but it had been completely destroyed by the moths. Félicité asked if she might have it as a keepsake. The two women looked at each other and their eyes filled with tears. Madame Aubain opened her arms and Félicité threw herself into them. Mistress and servant embraced each other, uniting their grief in a kiss that made them equal. It was the first time that this had ever happened….Félicité could not have been more grateful if she had been offered a priceless gift and from then on she doted on her mistress with dog-like fidelity and the reverence that might be accorded a saint. (27) Madame Aubain’s kiss provides a physical bridge that lets Félicité transfer her internal object to her employer, as seen by the extremity of Félicité’s adoration and devotion, which is identical to her feelings for Virginie during confirmation. Félicité keeps Virginie’s hat, along with mementoes of her other passions, until her death. Towards the end of her life, the fluidity of the objects of Félicité’s affection reaches an extremity that has caused many readers to find her insane, or at least epileptic: When she went to church, she would sit gazing at the picture of the Holy Spirit and it struck her that it looked rather like her parrot….In her mind, the one became associated with the other, the parrot becoming sanctified by connections with the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit in turn acquiring added life and 180 meaning….She developed the idolatrous habit of kneeling in front of the parrot to say her prayers. Sometimes the sun would catch the parrot's glass eyes as it came through the little window, causing an emanation of radiant light that sent her into ecstasies. (35-7) Loulou the parrot and his transformative corpse have received much critical attention since Trois Contes was first published, and there is a well-established critical position that the “emanation of radiant light that sent [Félicité] into ecstasies” is an epileptic fit. The mass market, too, has recognized Loulou, and several editions of Trois Contes have featured illustrations of parrots, most recently the contemporary paperback Penguin “classic” edition of Three Tales, which has a period photograph of a parrot as its cover illustration. Interest in Loulou extends even to the stuffed parrot that served as Flaubert’s model for Loulou, which anchors the important postmodern novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1985), by Julian Barnes. Loulou’s importance has led critics to read Stein’s cavalier treatment of the parrot in “The Good Anna” as a signal that Stein didn’t take Flaubert’s model that seriously. Anna receives the parrot as a make-peace gift from the daughter of Miss Mary, and Anna “liked the parrot very well,” but not as much as her other, much-loved pets (19). The parrot remains nameless, and almost entirely undescribed and undramatized, until Anna gives it away: “She had really never loved the parrot and now she hardly thought to ask for him” (44). I see this “disrespect” for Loulou as Stein’s signal that her adaptation of Flaubert is complex, and that those looking for a “parroting,” one-to-one correspondence will be disappointed. Anna’s desires are more definitely oriented than Félicité’s, if not more clearly expressed through conventional sexual means. Anna is fond of one of her employers, the 181 male Dr. Shonjen; of her male tenants when she runs a boarding house; and of her dogs of both sexes, but the face of her desire is firmly turned towards other women, and her internal object is projected only once in strength, on Mrs. Lehnten. Though the extent of the women’s sexual relations is not precisely delineated (as it is not in most fiction), and though the extent of its physicality cannot be fixed, Stein’s explicit depiction of sex between women elsewhere in Three Lives effectively removes the possibility of overt sexual relations between Anna and Lehntman. As Stein spends considerably time clarifying the “romance” itself, and as she writes about lesbian sex elsewhere in the text, we do not see self-censorship or reticence in “The Good Anna” but rather a naturalist rendering of sexual repression. That said, there is no question that Anna’s great love is homosexual, and that her internal object has one primary home. Stein writes: “The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna’s life” (19). And again: “Remember, Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna’s life” (22). And again and again and again: “Neither the good Anna nor the careless Mrs. Lehntman would give each other up excepting for the gravest cause.” (33); “But what could our poor Anna do? Remember Mrs. Lehntman was the only romance Anna ever knew.” (33); “And then, too, Mrs. Lehntman was the only romance Anna ever knew” (35). Even when tested, Anna’s romance remains so sacred that she cannot share its trouble with others: “Her affair with Mrs. Lehntman was too sacred and too grievous ever to be told” (30). Though many treatments of “The Good Anna” since the rise of second-wave feminism and GLBTQ Studies mention this “romance,” they do not acknowledge how very hard the reader is beaten about the head with this term and its 182 reality. Nor to my knowledge is there a nuanced assessment of Anna that takes her sexual orientation into account. Stein critics, however unintentionally, have therefore said in their silence that Anna’s orientation does not matter, and that Stein’s tremendous bravery and activism in so bluntly writing a same-sex romance is unworthy of serious notice or analysis. In other words, all the pounds of literary analysis of Three Lives have failed to solidify the apparitional lesbian in “The Good Anna,” even in the face of a much-repeated, much-dramatized same-sex romance. 14 That said, romance is more than a mixture of sexual desire, idealization, and loss of ego. Romance is also a literary genre—and after years of reading through the canon, Stein knew well the admixture of saint’s lives, quest narratives, accounts of battles, and hymns to pure love that comprise romance. Romance does not contain much romantic love as we know it. The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica notes the “purity” of love in the romance, contrasts it with the sexuality of the farce, and notes that “In a very wide reading of romance [as it is commonly understood,] the present writer does not remember more than two or three passages of romance proper” (502). Romance as a genre is defined by the following: the absence of a central plot, and the prolongation rather than the evolution of the story; the intermixture of the supernatural; the presence and indeed prominence of love-affairs; the juxtaposition of tragic and almost farcical incident; the variety of adventure arranged rather in the fashion of a panorama than otherwise. (500) This definition suits all six installments of Trois Contes and Three Lives. For instance, the stories of Anna and Félicité are episodic (and thus prolong rather than evolve), have supernatural elements (Anna with a fortune teller, Félicité with the holy parrot), and juggle the tragic and comic. Furthermore, both “Un Coeur Simple” and “The Good 183 Anna” update the romance’s struggle to “antiquate the classical assumption that love is an inferior motive, and that women, though they ‘may be good sometimes’ are scarcely fit for the position of principal personages” (Britannica 504). In addition, both Anna and Félicité excel as examples of the romantic heroine. Both carry on the struggle of the romance to extend heroism to new subjects. Both are “chaste” and “pure,” as the terms were understood by contemporaries. Both are faithful to love objects that are considered inferior if they are even comprehensible by the mores of their day. 15 And both were seen upon publication as either unworthy of their status as heroines or as an example of the author’s struggle to make heroism more inclusive. For instance, Félicité’s passionate love for her dead parrot is commonly regarded either as a sign of insanity or as a way for her to process her epileptic fits rather than a way to experience passion under extraordinary constraints. Though literary critics have extended considerable sympathy to Félicité, we shall see that they have remained harsh in their judgment of Anna, withholding sympathy for her difficult position. Stein uses the generic conventions of romance to portray an idealized love that does not incorporate physical sexuality—a strategy used by twentieth-century gays and lesbians in life as well as art to avoid homophobia, both social and self-imposed. Anna uses this strategy to tragic success, the full ramifications of which effloresce under the black light of Anna’s self-ignorance and the inattention of her critics, who have commented on the similar generic conventions of Trois Contes and Three Lives but not on the union of genre and sexuality. 16 Yet Stein’s map of same-sex passion has considerable articulation. Mrs. Lehntman contains in her name lehnt, German for abuts or 184 revolts. She literally abuts, is “adjacent to something along one side” (presumably hegemony, and in another sense, Anna) as she rebels, “resists authority or rules.” As she abuts and rebels, she revolts and is revolting: “to feel, or cause somebody to feel, disgust or repulsion.” Lehntman is also a near homophone for Lenten, something meager enough for Lent, the period before Easter that Anna as a faithful, mass-going Catholic would observe in prayer, fasting, and self-denial. Anna’s romance is both her greatest passion play and a Lenten act of sexual denial. The physicality of the relationship is appropriately meager for a life where the possibility of lesbian sex has been crucified by society, never to be reborn. There is no lesbian Easter for Anna. Though Lehntman does not have sex with Anna, Lehntman does have a midwife’s familiarity with female sexuality and genital intimacy, and her eventual ownership of a home for unwed mothers and her association with an abortionist deepens her hold on the far end of propriety. Lehntman’s professional dedication has a political bent, if not one consciously articulated as such in a period when inequities of gender and sexuality were not considered proper political subjects: “Mrs. Lehntman in her work loved best to deliver young girls who were in trouble” (20). 17 Stein doesn’t stop at such connotations of broad queerness but specifies the same-sex nature of Mrs. Lehntman’s power of attraction—“A certain magnetic brilliancy in person and in manner made Mrs. Lehntman a woman other women loved” (33)—and clarifies the extent of Anna’s desire—“Anna wanted Mrs. Lehntman; very much and Mrs. Lehntman needed Anna” (35, Stein’s punctuation). Anna wants nothing else “much,” much less “very much.” 185 Thoughts and actions related to the romance of Anna and Lehntman are the greatest interpersonal throughline of “The Good Anna.” Anna’s affection for Lehntman colors her career, and keeps her from leaving town with her first mistress, Miss Mary: “Perhaps if Mrs. Lehntman had not been in Bridgepoint, Anna would have tried to live in this new house” (22). The great crises of Anna’s life are the two crises of her relations with Lehntman, both sparked by Lehntman’s association with a strange male. First, Mrs. Lehntman adopts a baby bastard. Though the adoption is consistent with Lehntman’s impulsive kindness, Anna finds it unforgivably irresponsible and impractical. Second, Lehntman has a murky relationship with a doctor who performs abortions, and though it’s never clear whether Lehntman’s relationship with the doctor is personal or professional, Anna cannot forgive this extremity of badness: “it was just as bad as it could be” (41). Anna and Lehntman’s relations never recover: “Now, slowly, Anna began to make it up with Mrs. Lehntman. They could never be as they had been before. Mrs. Lehntman could never be the romance in the good Anna’s life, but they could be friends again” (45). Anna’s other associations cannot compare, whether they be with her other close friend, Mrs. Drehten—“There was no fever in this friendship, it was just the interchange of two hard working, worrying women” (29)—or with her favorite employer, Miss Mathilda, who “was not a romance in the good Anna’s life, but Anna gave her so much strong affection that it almost filled her life as full” (41). Here, Stein clarifies that Anna and Lehntman’s bond extends past “normal” friendship and “strong affection” to “fever.” Why, then, is this “maiden german mind” with her “angular, thin, spinster body” so emphatically pure—or from a perspective that values sexual expression, so thwarted? 186 (24). 18 In other words, why don’t Anna and Lehnten have sex? We shall see that other characters entertain this possibility for the couple. Why doesn’t Anna? One answer may be that the relationship is uneven: “Anna wanted Mrs. Lehntman; very much and Mrs. Lehntman needed Anna” (35, Stein’s punctuation, my italics). Another answer may seen in Anna’s rigorous policing of her dogs’ sexuality, her “high ideas for canine chastity and discipline” and her reaction to their “periods of evil thinking [which] came very regularly…at such times Anna would be very busy and scold hard” (8). Sexual impropriety trumps lying in Anna’s litany of sins: “‘Peter was the father of those pups,’ the good Anna explained to Miss Mathilda, ‘and they look just like him too…but Miss Mathilda, I would never let those people know that Peter was so bad’” (8). 19 In fact, the ruthless bargaining that serves to establish Anna’s character at the start of her portrait in “Part 1” immediately precedes two examples of her sexual policing: her chastisement of the dogs comes after her entrapment and scolding of an underservant whose delivery boyfriend secretly visits Anna’s kitchen, despoiling its sexless spotlessness. Anna’s lust for sexual control coincides with her desire for flawless propriety, both in herself and others: No argument could bring her to sit an evening in the empty parlour, although the smell of paint when they were fixing up the kitchen made her ever sick, and tired as she always was, she never would sit down during the long talks she held with Miss Mathilda. A girl was a girl and should always act like a girl (15). No matter how old or successful Anna becomes, she still conceives of herself as a servant girl—she is never Miss Federner, much less Miss Anna—and she always does a servant girl’s work. This work ethic kills her: 187 She worked away her appetite, her health and strength, and always for the sake of those who begged her not to work so hard. To her thinking, in her stubborn, faithful german soul, this was the right way for a girl to do (21). Throughout “The Good Anna,” Stein details how her Anna’s insistence on servile perfection entwines with her physical weakening, sickness, and death. Furthermore, Anna’s insistence on the perfect fulfillment of her hegemonic role makes any physical same-sex expression impossible. “Good” girls don’t do that! It would be incorrect as well as condescending to entirely view Anna as a victim, for she dies in her own service. Anna profits from her fidelity to hegemony in direct proportion to how she suffers, for within her self-imposed constraints of “goodness,” she is master. Here Anna differs from Félicité, though Félicité too has reservoirs of strength which may be tapped when appropriately channeled, as when resisting her fiancée’s sexual advances, or saving her mistress’s children from a rampaging bull: One a literal and the other a metaphoric defense of chastity and purity. Félicité does not, however, share Anna’s joy in dominion. “The Good Anna” begins by dramatizing its hero’s aggression, which is constrained by her social position but fierce nonetheless: “The tradesmen of Bridgepoint learned to dread the sound of ‘Miss Mathilda,’ for with that name the Good Anna always conquered” (7). For Anna, her station is the armor that allows her to act inappropriately masculine and not only show aggression but conquer. Compare this to Félicité, who is similarly invested in looking after her mistress’s interest but lacks Anna’s fierceness and pleasure in domination: “[The farmers] would both come bearing chickens or cheeses which they hoped they might persuade her to buy. But 188 Félicité was more than a match for their banter and they always respected her for this” (8). The earliest incident related from Anna’s life is another testament to her fierceness. Her first mistress asked her to see someone home, which the seventeen-year- old Anna thought more appropriate for a maid than for the servant she is, “and so she promptly left the place” (15). Anna’s fierce devotion to correctness extends past behavior: she “knew so well the kind of ugliness appropriate to each rank in life” and buys presents “having the right air for a member of the upper class” for the Misses Mary and Matilda, and gifts with the appropriate “awkward ugliness” for her servant friends— all at the same cost (26). Her rigid standards and rules infect the narrative itself, where girls are always called by their first name, and where married women, even one’s intimate friends and romantic partners, are invariably called Mrs.; we never learn Mrs. Lehntman’s first name, and Anna presumably never uses it. Though Anna abjects herself to her principles of service, goodness, and propriety—to her role in hegemony as she understands it—she isn’t abject in the temporal realm, for she only serves those she can dominate in terms of these principles: Anna found her place with large, abundant women, for such were always lazy, careless, and helpless, and so the burden of their lives could fall on Anna, and give her just content. Anna’s superiors must always be these large helpless women, or be men, for none others could give themselves to be made so comfortable and free. (16) The same hegemonic masculinity that makes Anna inferior to men by class and gender also keeps male masters from correcting or controlling Anna as long as she stays in her appropriate place. In other words, men can tell Anna her duties but not how to do them. 189 Therefore Anna “loved to work for men, for they could eat so much and with such joy. And when they were warm and full, they were content, and let her do whatever she thought best” (24). Women are more complicated than men for Anna, as they are entitled to enter the feminine sphere and thus to interfere, which is intolerable to Anna. She only works for “large helpless women” who, like men, will allow Anna complete control in her domain. Other women are more difficult, even as girls, unless they are her equals or inferiors. Consider Anna’s relations with Miss Mary’s children: “She naturally preferred the boy, for boys always love better to be done for…while in the little girl she had to meet the feminine, the subtle opposition, showing so early in a young girl’s nature” (16). Anna’s only problems at work stem from such opposition from women. Miss Mary’s little girl issues the only order Anna directly disobeys, and Anna’s refusal to serve a woman who will challenge her authority makes her leave Dr. Shonjen when he gets married, and contributes to her leaving Miss Mary when she moves in with her daughter, who is now grown. Anna’s refusal to brook female opposition in the workplace is so strong that she refuses to let woman live in her boarding house. Anna thus brilliantly redeploys a social position that is heavily stacked against her. She uses her female, servile, immigrant status to attain dominance while hewing to the requirements of her subordinate position, a move that requires a highly-developed consciousness of every jot and tittle of the “firm old world sense of what was the right way for a girl to do”—of what is good and what is not (15). By these lights, Anna is good, as her Homeric epithet insists—and her “goodness” appropriately extends to the 190 rigorous policing of others as well as the charity that regularly consumes her free time and savings. As she controls herself, so she fights to reproduce her strictures in others, and Stein makes much of Anna’s pains in teaching a series of underservants, as well as a variety of other women, to be “proper.” In fact, the “life” begins, after detailing Anna’s fierce victories over tradesmen, by a detailed recital of Anna’s struggles with these servants, fixing this aspect of her nature in the reader. When shielded by her servitude, and empowered and assured by Goodness as she knows it, Anna is a joyful knight: “But truly she loved it best when she could scold” (24). Anna’s interpretation of hegemonic discourse allows her not only to nag and harass her underservants but also to boss her employers as long as she never oversteps her bounds, an allowance that Anna takes in full. For instance, Anna persists in scolding Dr. Shonjen, “whom she could guide and constantly rebuke to his own good” (24), and Miss Mathilda, whom she scolds for not dressing as she should, and for buying too many objets d’art. Though such scolding is inspired by affection, Anna also scolds out of duty: “Not that [Mrs. Lehntman’s daughter] was pleasant in the good Anna’s sight, but it must never be that a young girl growing up should have no one to make her learn to do things right” (25). Anna’s love of scolding—her desire to control people and tell them what to do— reveals that, like many soldiers, she prefers fighting for her cause to living in territory that is securely in the hands of what she fights for. After all, if Anna really loved hegemonic propriety, she would happily work for women who interfered with her control, and who, by virtue of their status as Anna’s boss, have the incontrovertible right to boss Anna as they wish. 191 Anna’s preference for being a soldier rather than a civilian extends to her erotic life. As Ann wishes to work for mistresses who are childish, self-indulgent, and physically lush, so her great romance is with the remarkably uncontrolled, financially feckless, and as Stein refrains, “diffuse” Lehntman, with “her happy way of giving a pleasant well diffused attention” (27). Anna’s hard certainty is equally matched with her mistresses’ soft confusion in large part because Anna has a lower status than her employers. This equivalence keeps the relationships both stable and exciting. Anna’s relationship with Lehntman is both stable and exciting for a different reason: Anna’s hard certainty of right and wrong and her desire to enforce this certainty find no purchase with Lehntman, who “could not really take in harsh ideas [and] was too well diffused to catch the feel of any sharp firm edge” (28). Even at her last appearance, Lehntman remains “as diffuse as always in her attention” (45). She runs her house with “slackness and neglect” and does “not trouble much with [her daughter], but gave her always all she wanted that she had, and let the girl do as she liked”—leaving Anna to pick up the slack, and to recognize that such “neglect” was “not from indifference or dislike on the part of Mrs. Lehntman, it was just her usual way” (25). Lehntman is Anna’s opposite not only in the “softness” of her diffuse personality but also in her relationship to being a “good girl.” As a midwife, Lehntman makes her living from female sexuality and its products. She gains economic independence and supports two children through her familiarity with female physicality and her assistance with birth, that sexual product and extremity of intimate, physical mess. Later, Lehntman enlists Anna’s help and money for buying and running a home where unwed pregnant 192 girls may gestate in peace. Only Lehntman’s involvement with the abortionist—the “evil and mysterious man who was the source of all her trouble”—pushes Lehntman so far over the propriety line that Anna cannot forgive her (45). While the romance lasts, however, loving Lehntman allows Anna to love the sexual and social “badness” that she has repressed in herself. Lehntman is an ideal screen for Anna to project her internal object upon, as she has or is associated with so many of the attributes that Anna has repressed so deeply that she can only experience them through the medium of another person. As Anna probably could not permit herself to love a woman who herself is promiscuous, a woman who makes her living from other women’s promiscuity is ideal. Anna feels a physical as well as a psychic attraction for Lehntman, who is a “good looking woman. She had a plump well rounded body, clear olive skin, bright dark eyes and crisp black curling hair” (19). This and the elaborations that follow—Lehntman is “pleasant, magnetic, efficient and good. She was very magnetic, very attractive, and very amiable” (19)—is the longest, most concentrated physical description in Anna’s “life,” as is appropriate for the woman who “entirely subdued [Anna] by her magnetic, sympathetic charm” (20). Anna’s romance with beautiful bad girl Lehntman, and to a lesser extent Anna’s preference for large, indolent, helpless mistresses, is reminiscent of the erotics of the commanding, rigorously controlled, icons of Twentieth-Century butch culture, domineering women who prefer to be paired with femmes whom they can “serve and protect,” and whose sexual pleasure largely comes from pleasing such partners. Though Anna and Lehntman do not make for a classic butch/femme couple, and though both have traits that fall on both sides of the binary, the paradigm remains an effective ground, as 193 does (to ring an expected chime) Stein’s own relationship with Toklas, which similarly fulfills and explodes the stereotype. Stein and Toklas sported respective butch and femme looks, and their gendered division of labor permeates The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (hereafter, The Autobiography). Stein eats, and Toklas cooks; Stein writes, and Toklas types; Stein supports Toklas financially; and both consider Toklas the “wife,” as explicitly stated in the Autobiography when Toklas famously notes that she could have written a book called The Wives of Geniuses I Have Sat With (14). Yet their relationship also indexed the mother-child relationship, which, granted, also shadows the wife-husband relationship. Note, however, that both Stein and Toklas used “Baby” as a private nickname for each other, a habit that may have derived from Stein’s childhood nickname, which was also “Baby.” 20 Both the nickname and Toklas’s extensive caretaking of Stein evoke the mother/child dynamic as much as the butch/femme duality, though the use of “Baby” as a nickname for both women indicates that both women play mother and daughter at times. Similarly, though Anna’s relationship with Lehntman primarily indexes the butch/femme binary, Anna’s relationships with her employers, especially with Miss Mathilda and Miss Mary, more clearly reference the love between a hardworking mother and a willful child or baby. Yet at the same time, Misses Mathilda and Mar support Anna by giving her wages and a place to live. In this way, Anna is the baby, or more precisely, the good daughter. In Three Lives, “Baby” is a dog, who is Anna and Lehntman’s “child” and serves as a symbol of their chaste romance. Baby is sexually the most “decent” of the dogs: 194 “innocent blind old Baby…the only one who preserved the dignity becoming in a dog” (8). Lehntman’s first appearance in the “life” is first mentioned in the context of Baby, “the new puppy, the pride of Anna’s heart, a present from her friend, the widow, Mrs. Lehntman” (17). The next mention of Baby and Mrs. Lehntman clarifies that Anna loves Baby the most of her pets—“best of all animals she loved the dog and best of all dogs, little Baby, the first gift from her friend, Mrs. Lehntman” (19)—which is immediately followed by the first mention of Anna and Lehntman’s special relationship, set off in a one-sentence paragraph: “The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna’s life” (19). As Anna and Lehntman’s relationship weakens and fails under the pressure of Lehntman’s relationship with the abortionist as well as excessive borrowing from Anna, so their child sickens and dies. At the end of her life, “Baby got weak and fat and breathless….Baby did not die with a real sickness. She just got older and more blind and coughed and then more quiet, and then slowly one summer’s day she died” (47). A similar desuetude permeates the women’s final relations, as seen in Lehntman’s final mention, both within the narrative and as read: Mrs. Lehntman she saw very rarely….They did their best, both these women, to be friends, but they were never able to touch one another nearly. There were too many things between them that they could not speak of, things that had never been explained nor yet forgiven. (51) The unspoken includes unexpressed sexuality. The Good Anna’s obsession with female propriety entails her romance with an uncontrolled, “diffuse” woman who makes her living from female sexuality but does not require Anna’s conscious understanding of the sexual aspects of her romance or of herself. In the light of the exhaustively detailed map 195 of Anna’s consciousness charted by Stein, Anna’s “romance” looms like a great volcano on a landscape where birth, “girls in trouble,” and “naughty” dogs and underservants are the sole explicit markers of sexuality. This cinder cone and environs are the only remnant of a prehistoric epoch when Anna’s desire was closer to the surface, and could build upon and mark it—a still portrait in scoria, aa, and pahoehoe which leaves Anna transfixed but which nonetheless is only a still portrait and a limited monument of the liquid heat beneath. Consider the one time that the possibility of sexual relations within the romance is directly discussed: The Federners [Anna’s brother’s family] had never seemed to feel it wrong in Anna, her devotion to her friend and her care of her and her children. Mrs. Lehntman and Anna and her feelings were all somehow too big for their attack. But Mrs. Federner had the mind and tongue that blacken things. Not really to blacken black, of course, but just to roughen and to rub on a little smut. She could somehow make even the face of the Almighty seem pimply and a little coarse. (32) The quote suggests that Anna and Lehntman’s relationship is too “big”—too intense, too sacred, too outside regular bounds—for the open discussion of the sexuality that serves as its fundament. When Mrs. Federner dares suggests the sexuality of Anna and Lehntman’s bonds and broaches the possibility of actual physical relations, she is degraded as someone with a dirty mind and a black tongue—a standard brand of octopus ink for a homosexual in denial. In other words, it’s the person who sees and even more names the eroticism who is made perverse, rather than the eroticism itself, which after all “isn’t there.” Federner “did not mean to interfere,” but perception alone may besmirch. Whether “the mind and tongue that blackens things” is a transcription of Anna’s 196 thoughts, the narrator’s presumably ironic statement, or both, Anna/the narrator sees Federner’s observation as rub[bing] on a little smut, in terms of corrupting an ideal with dirt; as black, if not blacken black, as in dirty; as pimply, a swelling of untoward fluid, an embarrassing, adolescent, bodily expression; and as a little coarse, unseemly, like Anna’s bad dogs, though not like Anna and Lehntman’s chaste puppy Baby. 21 In the light of her commitment to propriety, and her historical context as a devout German Catholic first-generation immigrant, it’s not surprising that Anna would not be able to conceptualize her sexuality, much less actively express it—and Anna’s inability to stop working, to relax from what she sees as her rightful role, leaves no doubt that she is capable of forcing her sexuality so deep underground. Anna strikes a hard bargain: She makes a secure place for herself within the social hierarchy, one that allows her aggression and dominance as long as she doesn’t contest the limits of her role, and one that allows her same-sex passion as long as she doesn’t contest, even in fantasy, the homophobic limits on her expression. Thus the tragedy of “The Good Anna,” which is both a blatant description of a lesbian romance and a thorough dramatization of the repression that thwarts the romance from arising to either sexual self-consciousness or sexual fruition. “Romance is the ideal in one’s life and it is very lonely living with it lost”—in part because the idealization serves to block out the larger absence of an unrealized sexuality (35). To be any more blunt, Stein would have to use bullet points. Which, as always with the apparitional lesbian, is easy to say but hard to prove. Four factors exorcize this ghostly trouble and manifest the phantasmic. First, the probable lack of physical love between the women should be chewed over in the overall context of 197 Anna’s sexuality, where there is a conspicuous lack of evidence of heterosexual romance, passion, or intimate relations of any kind, no analogue to Félicité’s fiancée, or even her Polish soldier. Second, Stein’s two previous narratives, Q.E.D. and Fernhurst, showcase explicitly lesbian relations, and Q.E.D. especially establishes the difficulty of the path to lesbian self-consciousness and sexual realization through a heroine who needs other lesbians to tell her that “you are queer and interesting even if you don’t know it and you like queer and interesting people even if you think you don’t” (192)—a heroine who, when chided for her separation of “affectionate comradeship” and “physical passion,” and her “puritanic horror” of the latter, decides that she “could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher” (182). Third “The Good Anna” conforms to many conventions of the pulp lesbian novel, a genre that doesn’t properly start for several decades. Consider the working-class milieu; the immoral, sometimes criminal, beloved; and the hardworking heroine who gives up everything, everything, for love—and who, when the beloved finally goes too far, tries a variety of other relationships, none of which have that fire—all of which, for instance, happens more than once in Anne Bannon’s Beebo Brinker series (1957-62). Presumably, such coincidence springs from a similar psychosexual foundation and social construction. Last, the antipathy bordering on revulsion that Anna has provoked in literary critics probably signals their knowing or unknowing comprehension of her same-sex orientation through their conscious or unconscious homophobia. At the very least, such critical distaste indicates a lack of appreciation for the historical difficulties of Anna’s psychosexual situation. While Anna is undeniably a domineering, interfering prude, she 198 is also steadfast, loyal, and so giving that she essentially bankrupts herself, both through extensive charity to both friends and strangers and through her unwillingness to sufficiently charge her customers when she runs a boarding house. Furthermore, her charity extends to those who disobey her prescriptions towards work and against sexuality. How prudish can she be if she underwrites a home for unwed mothers? In light of Stein’s nuanced portrayal of her character, the critical reaction to Anna is suspect. For instance, James Mellow’s 1974 description of Anna as “domineering,” especially when positioned against his description of Félicité as “bovine,” seems reasonable, but the fervor of Carl Wood’s 1975 distaste for Anna indicates something unsaid: “the middle-aged, sharp-tongued, immigrant housekeeper with whom we are confronted at the beginning of the story is clearly a petty and incorrigible domestic tyrant” (306). Though Stein shows and explicitly tells us how Anna works herself to death, Wood holds that “her life could be called arduous and troubled only from her own point of view” (306). Even critics who are kind to Anna still find her somehow “wrong.” When Bridgman calls her “A conscience-ridden german catholic housekeeper who drives herself and those under her remorselessly, at the cost of recurrent headaches” (292), he agrees that she is hard on herself as she is on others but elides her charity. In short, Marianne DeKoven speaks for a plurality of critics when she writes “the ‘good’ in ‘The Good Anna’ is highly ironic” (x). Even critics who define themselves as feminists sensitive to lesbian issues lack compassion for or comprehension of Anna in lesbian terms, and the hard bargain that she is forced to make in exchange for a stable place for 199 herself in her society. Instead, discussion of lesbian sexuality in Three Lives has focused on “Melanctha”—and then only in terms of its racial translation. “Melanctha” and the Harder Bargain In Chapter 3, I followed the evolution of criticism of “Melanctha” into the current dominant reading, which claims that Stein encodes queer sexuality in terms of race, and largely ignores the other two “lives.” This conflation has hindered the rigorous examination of either race or sexuality throughout Three Lives. In this section, I briefly reconsider the question of whether “Melanctha” is a racist portrait before I turn to my primary focus: A lesbian reading of “Melanctha” that parses the heroine’s psychological make-up in lesbian terms. If Anna invests her self-image into in her stock as a proper servant and strikes the hard bargain of psychological security, epistemological certainty, and considerable power at the cost of an embodied sexuality, then Melanctha is Anna’s opposite, a woman who fights social constraints and sexual normativity at the cost of instability and powerlessness. She is a mixed-race flâneuse who “wanders” through various categories of being, refusing to accept either their benefits or deficits at the cost of perpetual restlessness and a steady swing between mania and misery. Melanctha’s dogged, unsuccessful search for a suitable self-representation and social persona brings on depression so great that she frequently wishes for death, whether by murder or her own hand: “a woman whom [Melanctha] knew had killed herself because she was so blue. Melanctha said, sometimes, she thought this was the best thing for her herself to do” (54). 200 Melanctha’s “life” traces her erotic, romantic, and familial relationships from her sexual awakening through her four primary attachments—Jane, Jeff, Rose, and Jem—until her death from tuberculosis, probably in her thirties. Melanctha never sustains a close relationship, either with her family or her lovers, and her greatest consistency is a steady state of flux. Melanctha’s search for a more accurate self-representation is echoed by the text itself, as in 1909, the representation of any psychologically complex African-American woman in a non-comic or folkloristic context was novel. An experimental portrait of a depressed, adrift African-American woman who diligently focuses her intelligence on the practice and perception of sexuality, drawn with rigorous attention to the complications of her consciousness, was so strange that it could not be easily understood. Melanctha’s status as the smartest, most valiant, and most self-aware of Stein’s three characters further compounds the originality of her “life,” and Stein’s creation of Melanctha as a complex heroine who defies contemporary norms as she searches for individual meaning is remarkably progressive. Throughout Three Lives, Stein offers a naturalistic portrait of Southern society that requires an accurate picture of the racial and ethnic hegemony of turn-of-the-century Baltimore. For instance, in “The Gentle Lena,” Stein records how Lena’s cousins, who were born in the United States, view their German relations: These hard working, earth-rough german cousins were to these american born children, ugly and dirty, and as far below them as were italian or negro workmen, and they could not see how their mother could ever bear to touch them, and then all the women dressed so funny, and were worked all rough and different. (153) 201 In a similar vein, Stein notes accurate social stratification when she writes that one of Lena’s cousins “Felt very badly that she had to say that this was her cousin Lena, this Lena who was little better for her than a nigger” (155). Nonetheless, like Anna and Lena, who are explicitly drawn in terms of the fixed attributes of their German ethnicity, Melanctha is drawn in the context of her race, and when her “life” is read out of context, the narrator’s racism is, certainly, offensive. As there is no gap as written between narrator and author, this racism easily translates to Stein. In addition, Stein’s status as a feminist, lesbian icon and role model situates Stein as broadly liberal in the public eye, which makes such racism more surprising and distressing, especially when considered by contemporary standards rather than that of the early twentieth century. My argument here is not about whether the text is racist: It is, just as it is racially progressive. Instead, my argument is about whether race is used to represent something other than itself. If so, it represents ethnicity, and not sexuality. For instance, critics have linked Melanctha’s promiscuity to her race, and have found this racialized promiscuity to represent a sub rosa lesbian sexuality by virtue of the common “abnormality” of promiscuity and same-sexuality in Melanctha’s place and time. But does promiscuity have a racial component in Three Lives? The many “girls in trouble” in “The Good Anna” are white, and Jeff in “Melanctha,” who fears and hates sex, is black. Similarly, why would Stein use promiscuity to signal lesbian sexuality when lesbian sexuality is directly represented in Three Lives? Promiscuity in Three Lives is exclusively heterosexual: Anna never expresses her sexuality physically; Lena only 202 experiences marital sex, which she detests; and though Melanctha and Jane are same-sex lovers, they are promiscuous only with men. Rather than encode homosexuality in terms of race, Stein pushes the boundary of racial representation in sexual terms. For instance, black critics since Audre Lord have proven that black women in fiction are traditionally either (1) not allowed sexuality or (2) oversexualized to fulfill white male fantasy. But Melanctha does not fulfill male sexuality. Instead, every man who encounters her, including her father, is irritated, frustrated, and finally abandoned by Melanctha. She doesn’t even serve as an inaccessible fantasy figure, as she is not only accessible but also vulnerable to her lovers…for a time. If same-sexuality is encoded in “Melanctha,” it is encoded in heterosexuality and, possibly, in Stein’s queer prose style much more than in race. In terms of homosexuality, race is a red herring. The focus on the encoding of sexuality through race on “Melanctha,” and more broadly on the consideration of race in “Melanctha” apart from “Anna” and “Lena,” has blunted critical investigations of race in Three Lives. For instance, many critics interpret Stein’s racism in terms of her complex relation towards her own Jewishness, heightened by her residence in Europe, where generally speaking Jews were oppressed, despised, and victimized as blacks were in the United States. 22 These critics do not, however, extend Stein’s ethnic projection to Anna and Lena as well as Melanctha, a sensible project in light of the turn-of-the century wave of Jewish immigration that significantly increased both the Jewish population and the strength of anti-semitism in America. This second wave of Jews hailed from Russia and Eastern Europe and were considerably less 203 educated and affluent than the earlier mainly German wave of Jewish immigrants that included Gertrude Stein’s parents. (Stein’s father’s family came over in 1841, and her mother’s family before). In a complex reaction formation, Stein projects her internal ambivalence towards her heritage and these latter Jews’ comparative poverty and lack of schooling onto the German immigrants Anna and Lena, as well as aspects of external and internalized anti-semitism onto African-Americans. As Jewish ethnicity has historically been treated in racial terms, race and ethnicity had permeable boundaries in Stein’s unconscious. My reductive but reasonable précis of these projections and reaction formations follows: I am Gertrude Stein, an upper-middle-class German Jew born in the United States. A new wave of poor, uneducated, non-German Jews arrives in my country and lowers my ethnic stock in the American hierarchy. As I don’t wish to directly write about Jews in my fiction as yet—possibly because I am more interested in issues of sexual identity, possibly because I find the subject too limiting or “close to home” for fictional treatment, possibly because I don’t identify or want to be pigeonholed as a “Jewish” writer, possibly because I am writing about Jews as I develop my next project, The Making of Americans, possibly because my fiction is conceptualized on an unconscious level—I will represent this non-German wave of poor, uneducated Jews as poor, uneducated Germans. 23 My inclusion of an African-American character stems from a similar substitution of Jewishness, taken from a different angle. Both waves of Jewish immigration to the United States were inspired by European anti-semitism. In Europe, Jews—who were 204 demonized as ungodly and savage; as oversexualized and sexually repulsive; and as physically repulsive, with both an animalistic preoccupation with the body and an inadequate physiognomy—were among the ethnic groups at the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy. 24 In the U. S., that bottom rung is filled by blacks. I, Gertrude, now live in Europe, but my fiction is situated in the United States. Therefore, in my art I will represent Jews as African-American—and as my relationship to my Jewishness is strained, “impure,” most of the African-Americans in my fiction will be of mixed race. An exclusive focus on “Melanctha” preempts such an analysis of Stein and race. My focus here, however, is not primarily on race but on sexuality. First I will consider the relationship of Melanctha and Jane Harden, both in terms of the relationship itself and in terms of Melanctha’s later relations with Dr. Jeff Holloway. I read this second relationship—easily the best-known aspect of all of Three Lives—as an encoding of homosexuality not in terms of race, as it is usually read, but in terms of heterosexuality and the queer style of Stein’s prose. I then parallel Melanctha’s final attachment—her intimate friendship with Rose Johnson, from which she never recovers—with Melanctha’s infancy and childhood, and discuss how her unsatisfactory family romance sets the pattern and tone of her adult romances and erotics. This lets me relate the trauma of a queer child in a hostile, heteronormative cultural and familial environment to Melanctha’s adult depression and self-destruction. I close by asking whether Melanctha can be best understood as a developmentally arrested protolesbian or as a fully realized (if socially oppressed) polymorphously perverse bisexual, and whether this distinction is either possible or worth making. 205 Melanctha is first dramatized on the cusp of adolescence, when her father, James, detects a sexual component to a family friend’s feelings for Melanctha. James pulls a razor on his friend, and then beats the uncomprehending Melanctha for encouraging him. This beating becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, as James thus brings his daughter to the sexual knowledge that the beating is meant to punish: “Melanctha began to know her power, the power she had so often felt stirring within her and which she now knew she could use to make her stronger” (59). 25 Throughout Melanctha’s “life,” power—as well as knowledge and wisdom—has sexual connotations; “Melanctha” is a text where the foundations, scope, and validity of knowledge are sexual in nature. For Melanctha, understanding—“world wisdom”—is sexual understanding, and her desire for such knowledge is her prime mover. The conflation of pain, power, and sexual knowledge drives Melanctha’s “life,” and when Melanctha can no longer draw strength, knowledge, and curiosity from the sexualized pain that others cause her—when the dynamo that is sparked by the beating finally dies down—she dies. Immediately after the beating, however, Melanctha’s sexual curiosity impels her through the railroad yards and shipyards of Bridgepoint, searching for a sexual experience but always backing out before “knowing” anyone in the sexual, biblical sense, a constant retrenching which Stein embodies in repetitive prose: Melanctha always made herself escape but….she would sometimes come very near to making a long step on the road that leads to wisdom….The man would sometimes come a little nearer, would detain her, would hold her arm or make his arms a little clearer, and then Melanctha would make her escape…Melanctha would always make herself escape….he never went so fast that he could stop her when at last she made herself escape….she always made herself escape. (63, my ellipses) 206 Melanctha teases herself and others “from twelve to sixteen, always seeking but never more than very dimly seeing wisdom” (60). Despite these close calls, Melanctha remains sexually ignorant: “And many things happened to Melanctha, but she knew very well that none of them led her on to the right way, that certain way to world wisdom” (65). Melanctha believes that sexual wisdom and experience can be found in men, but she doesn’t learn much from them. Note the gendered dichotomy between Melanctha’s conscious and realized desires in the following: “In these young days, it was only men that for Melanctha held anything there was of knowledge and power. It was not from men however that Melanctha learned to really understanding this power” (60). Melanctha doesn’t begin a proper sexual study until sixteen, when she meets the twenty- three-year-old Jane Harden, an educated, intelligent, mixed-race, heavy-drinker who was kicked out of college for “bad conduct” (65). Jane, whose primary epithet is “roughened” and whose name itself is “hard,” is introduced as a character who “had much experience. She was very much attracted by Melanctha, and Melanctha was very proud that this Jane would let her know her” (65). Jane, who has “wandered widely,” teaches Melanctha “how to go the ways of wisdom” (65). Stein’s persistent use of the traditional tag of “knowledge” and her more idiosyncratic tags of “wisdom,” “wandering,” and “learning” for the gaining of sexual experience and facility with sexual expression proves the sexual pedagogy of this relationship. Consider: “Jane taught Melanctha many things. She taught her to go the ways that lead to wisdom.” And again: “Jane Harden was not afraid to understand. Melanctha who had strong the desire for real experience, knew that here was a woman who had learned to understand” (65). 207 Initially, Jane and Melanctha’s relationship is triangulated through men, but the need for homosocial triangulation soon dissipates as male-centered “wandering” evolves into Melanctha-and-Jane-centered “wandering,” into sexual knowledge as told through narrative, and finally into sexual experience itself: Jane grew always fonder of Melanctha. Soon they began to wander, more to be together than to see men and learn their various ways of working. Then they began not to wander, and Melanctha would spend long hours with Jane in her room, sitting at her feet and listening to her stories, and feeling her strength and the power of her affection, and slowly she began to see clear before her one certain way that would be sure to lead to wisdom….[Jane] loved Melanctha hard and made Melanctha feel it very deeply….[Melanctha] learned to love Jane Harden and to have this feeling very deeply. She learned a little in these days to know joy, and she was taught too how very keenly she could suffer….with Jane Harden she was longing and she bent and pleaded with her suffering. (66-7) How much more explicit could this passage be without venturing into a direct depiction of sex acts? Jane’s pedagogy extends past physical tutoring to using her manipulation of Melanctha as an exemplar of how to translate sexual knowledge into the ability to manipulate others: “She would be with other people and with men and with Melanctha and she would make Melanctha understand what everybody wanted, and what one did with power when one had it” (66). Once Melanctha learns this final lesson, however, she falls out with Jane for no stated reason apart from the fact that Jane has nothing left to teach her, and the women have come to a state of rest: Sometimes the lesson came almost too strong for Melanctha, but somehow she always managed to endure it and so slowly, but always with increasing strength and feeling, Melanctha began to really understand. Then slowly, between them, it began to be all different. Slowly now between them, it was Melanctha Herbert, who was stronger. Slowly now they began to drift apart from each other. (67) 208 In the space of an indent, Melanctha has successfully internalized her sexual knowledge, which removes her need for Jane: Melanctha now began to feel that she had always had world wisdom. She really knew of course, that it was Jane who taught her, but all that began to be covered over by the trouble between them, that was now always getting stronger. (67) Jane, resilient in terms of men, never recovers from Melanctha’s loss. (In fact, Jane is never shown to have any emotional ties to men whatsoever.) Though Jane was dominant in the relationship, she now falls into an alcoholic decline. In her bitterness, she works to prejudice Dr. Jefferson Campbell, a conservative young African-American doctor who has been treating Melanctha’s ill mother: Jane sometimes had abused Melanctha to him. What right had that Melanctha Herbert who owed everything to her, Jane Harden, what right had a girl like that to go away to other men and leave her….Jeff Campbell heard all this very often” (70). As Jeff doesn’t yet properly (or improperly) know Melanctha, we may assume that Jane tries to turn everyone against Melanctha, and not just Melanctha’s lovers. Classic revenge by a spurned lover who badmouths the spurner—and Jane’s later contempt for Rose Johnson, her same-sex successor, is also typical bad-ex behavior: “Jane despised Rose for an ordinary, stupid, sullen black girl. Jane could not see what Melanctha could find in that black girl, to endure her. It made Jane sick to see her” (125). Jane’s sneer is an unusually accurate, realist example of intra-racism and the color hierarchy within the African-American community. In addition, it may reflect the similar gradation present between German Jews and more recently arrived Eastern European Jews. But at bottom, Jane’s sneer is an indication of her continued love for Melanctha. 209 Despite Jane’s meddling, Jeff is attracted to Melanctha and reassured that she is not beyond the social pale by her selfless care for her ungrateful mother. Jeff and Melanctha now begin the relationship that receive that the lion’s share of pages in the story, and a larger lion’s share of the critical attention. At this point in the story, Melanctha seems to be following the normative path of sexual development endorsed by Freud in Three Essays on Sexuality, within which an adolescent phase of homosexual orientation is superseded by heterosexual maturity: Now that Melanctha has become sexually mature, she turns from women to men. The fact that Melanctha’s physicality with Jeff is not described as much as hers with Jane is odd, however, and Melanctha’s subsequent history thoroughly queers this progression. Though Jane still does not know that Jeff and Melanctha are lovers, she nonetheless badly wounds the relationship when she again tells Jeff how Melanctha once had loved her, Jane Harden. Jane began to tell Jeff of all the bad ways Melanctha had used with her. Jane began to tell all she knew of the way Melanctha had gone on, after she had left her. Jane began to tell all about the different men, white ones and blacks, Melanctha was never particular about things like that….Melanctha always liked to use all the understanding ways that Jane had taught her, and so she wanted to know everything, always, that they knew how to teach her. (90, my ellipsis) Jeff now pays closer attention to Jane than before. Her profession of Melanctha’s sexual knowledge and experience makes Jeff feel “very sick at heart and his heart was very heavy, and Melanctha certainly did seem very ugly to him” (90). Despite Jane’s constant assertion of the women’s love, Jeff never understands that Jane is Melanctha’s ex-lover. He therefore cannot weigh how this history might affect Jane’s perceptions of Melanctha, or how this history might give Jane a reason to put Melanctha in a bad light. 210 Jeff cannot see Jane as Melanctha’s ex-lover for the same reason that Jeff cannot easily bring himself to love a promiscuous, sexually experienced woman who sees sexuality as a type of knowledge. His self-image and self-representation require that his sexual knowledge lie strictly within socially approved boundaries. For if Jeff loves a non- normative woman, a “bad” girl, then he stops being normal and becomes a “bad” boy, which is unbearable to him, as we shall see. Jeff and Melanctha’s relationship now declines under the pressure of the repetitive, stylized conversations and letters that are the most famous example of the queer style of Three Lives: I certainly don’t say to you Jeff Campbell I admire very much the way you take to be good Jeff Campbell. I am sorry Dr. Campbell, but I certainly am afraid I can’t stand it no more from you the way you have been just acting. I certainly can’t stand it any more the way you act when you have been as if you thought I was always good enough for anybody to have with them, and then you act as if I was a bad one and you always just despise me. I certainly am afraid Dr. Campbell I can’t stand it any more like that. I certainly can’t stand it anymore the way you are always changing. I certainly am afraid Dr. Campbell you ain’t man enough to deserve to have anybody care so much to be always with you. I certainly am awful afraid Dr. Campbell I don’t ever any more want to really see you. Good-by Dr. Campbell I wish you always to be real happy. (91) Melanctha and Jeff go on like this for some time. These arguments are close, sometimes direct, translations of conversations between the lovers Adele and Helen in Q.E.D., and presumably between their models, Gertrude Stein and May Bookstaver. These arguments, exclusive of the characters’ race, offer clear evidence of lesbian encoding in Three Lives, as essential conflicts of contemporary same-sexuality are projected onto a heterosexual relationship for what we will see is an imperfect fit. Before we examine the fit, however, let us examine the material that makes up these arguments. 211 Melanctha and Jeff’s arguments place them on different sides of a binary between two ways of knowing that Lisa Ruddick has delineated as “linear and progressive” [Jeff] and “circular and rhythmic” [Melanctha] (385). 26 Jeff and Melanctha themselves characterize their differences more crudely. Melanctha distinguishes between [linear] thinking and [circular] feeling, and demands respect and attention be paid to feeling. To this end, she asks: “Don’t you ever stop with your thinking long enough to have any feeling Jeff Campbell?” (83). (This quote is a close transcription of a question in Q.E.D. that Helen asks Adele: “Haven’t you ever stopped thinking long enough to feel?” (186).) Jeff himself distinguishes between “two kinds of loving,” one sexualized and one not, one with “excitement” and one not, one a “good quiet kind of feeling in a family when one does his work,” the other “just like having it just like any animal that’s low in the streets together” (78). Jeff wants him and Melanctha to have a “good quiet kind of feeling,” one that values social expectations and norms at least as much as sexual and emotional intensity and pleasure, while Melanctha doesn’t view such “feeling” to be properly emotional and physical. Who wins? No one. Jeff and Melanctha never resolve their disagreements, and their relationship ends. Who, then, does the narrative deem correct? Jeff has the happier ending: He moves to a different town, establishes a successful medical practice, and has fond memories of Melanctha. But the narrator never overtly validates Jeff’s perspective, and his near-total disappearance from both the Melanctha’s and the narrator’s thoughts once his involvement with Melanctha ends leaves the impression that Jeff away from Melanctha is not very interesting. Furthermore, though “Melanctha” is replete with 212 statements that Melanctha is unhappy, the narrator never criticizes or blames Melanctha for either her actions or her unhappiness. Instead, the narrator, like Melanctha herself, keeps returning to the question of why Melanctha acts and feels as she does—and the reader follows the narrator and the heroine in pondering the mystery of Melanctha’s melancholy. There is no smoking gun, but the answer must be either an aspect of Melanctha that is either inherently “bad” or that cannot be happily realized in Melanctha’s society. In the light of the rest of Three Lives, the specifically lesbian in particular, and the broadly queer in general, fits the bill and solves the mystery. Whatever causes Melanctha’s melancholy probably relates to her strongest conviction: her insistence on a sexualized “feeling” and “thinking” that doesn’t fit social norms, both in argument and in life. Whatever the answer is, the narrative doesn’t damn it. Instead, the “life” wonders at the fate of a character stationed on Melanctha’s side of the binary, and forces the reader to wonder as well. Stein’s stylistic embodiment of Melanctha’s insistence on valuing “feeling” and “thinking” that fall outside of convention has proven to be for most readers the most memorable part of Three Lives. Stein’s repudiation of traditional styling—her use of a point of view so close that it dips into the affect and unconscious of the characters— signals a similarly queer interior, though not necessarily a lesbian one. Still, it’s surprising that none of the considerable critical attention to Melanctha and Jeff’s binary and their “life’s” style has led to an investigation in specifically lesbian terms. For if Melanctha and Jeff’s binary may be easily sewn to Q.E.D.’s arguments between Adele and Helen, and basted even farther back to those between Stein and Bookstaver, then we 213 need to remember that these originary conflicts are typical, even stereotypical, fights between a lesbian and a proto-lesbian who has not yet consciously incorporated her sexual and emotional desires into her self-comprehension, and who is stuck between her emotional and bodily desires and a rationalization that attempts to deny them. In other words, Jeff and Melanctha enact a classic argument between a lesbian and a woman who has not yet accepted a same-sex orientation. 27 A homosexual issue has been encoded in heterosexual terms, and the specifically lesbian translated into terms that can be applied to any non-normative sexuality. The implausibility of the heterosexuality of Jeff and Melanctha’s relationship stands out in an otherwise realist milieu. Consider the following quote, one of many that puts into question whether Jeff is a straight man or a re-gendered, re-oriented mask for the lesbians of Q.E.D. and Stein’s biography: And about you being so good…You don’t care so much about going to church much yourself, and yet you always are saying you believe in things like that, for people. It seems to me, Dr. Campbell you want to have a good time just like all us others, and then you just keep on saying that it’s right to be good and you ought not to have excitements, and yet you really don’t want to do it, Dr. Campbell, no more than me or Jane Harden. (74) In this rejoinder, Melanctha accuses Jeff of advocating a standard that he neither follows nor wants to follow. Stein picks Melanctha’s words carefully, for Melanctha has the “excitements” that Jeff both wants and wants to repress. The sexual nature of the “excitements” is clarified through their association with Jane and Melanctha and their opposition to church. If Jeff were a hypocrite, promoting a sexual code that he knows he cannot or will not follow, or if Jeff believed in a gendered binary where women were expected to control their sexuality more than men—at least those women with whom he 214 had a romantic rather than an exclusively sexual relationship—then he would be a man of his time. But Jeff is sincere, which is not credible. What is Jeff’s problem? Contemporary convention allowed an upstanding man to spend time with a loose woman, so long as he didn’t marry her. By 1909, writers such as Howells, Dreiser, James, and Wharton had been writing for decades about not only eligible bachelors but married characters who dabble in the demimondaine and then return to their church, wife, and children without suffering for their double life. For instance, consider the primary extramarital relationship in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). George Hurstwood’s troubles begin not with self-laceration over his extramarital relationship with Carrie but with Carrie and his wife finding out about each other. Hurstwood’s wife is willing to take him back if he meets certain financial requirements. If he did, Hurstwood might lose Carrie, but he could presumably find a replacement. Hurstwood is punished not for the affair, but for inflating the affair past acceptable levels of importance and leaving his wife, children, and job, as well as embezzling so that he can support Carrie. His punishment for flouting the social order is severe, and includes homelessness, pneumonia, beggary, and a flophouse suicide. Male infidelity, as long as it doesn’t threaten the marital unit, goes unpunished even in the work of conservative naturalists, as in Ellen Glasgow’s Virginia (1913), and the absence of such infidelity is cause for comment in the work of earlier, French naturalists such as Zola. And Jeff is single, which makes his scruples even stranger. The keeping of a difficult, promiscuous mistress by a single man had been a standard feature of contemporary fiction in both countries for decades if not centuries by the 1909 publication of Three Lives. 215 Similarly, if Jeff is a straight man, then marriage is possible for Jeff and Melanctha—but the consideration of marriage is conspicuous in its absence. Marriage is a major concern for Melanctha and her next male love object, Jem, so why isn’t it a feature of the long, long discussions between Melanctha and Jeff? There isn’t a racial problem between them; Melanctha’s lighter color and Jeff’s greater income makes for an appropriate and traditional match according to this racist calculus of their community. 28 There’s no evidence that Jeff considers Melanctha’s social class and sexual past a disqualification for marriage. If there were, it’s very much in character for him to repeatedly fret, as he does about so much else, but here the pages are silent. In “The Good Anna,” the impossibility of marriage for Anna and Lehntman is assigned some responsibility for the dissolution of their friendship: “It is only in a close tie such as marriage, that influence can mount and grow always stronger with the years and never meet with a decline” (35). Anna and Lehntman’s decline is echoed by Jeff and Melanctha’s, despite the possibility of bolstering the relationship through marriage. Though commentary on the transformation of Q.E.D.’s Adele into Jeff is voluminous, I have found a surprising dearth of comment on the resulting lack of talk of marriage between Melanctha and Jeff, probably because the observation requires an angle that puts the heterosexuality rather than the race of the relationship in question. But Jeff’s race is immaterial to his substitution for Q.E.D.’s Adele. His gender, by contrast, is fundamental. The absence of the possibility of marriage for Melanctha and Jeff as well as Jeff’s squeamishness over the form of his and Melanctha’s love makes an imperfect fit with the 216 social construction of heterosexuality when the novel as published. This lapse is not the only argument that the heterosexuality of the relationship as an incomplete and imperfect translation of the specifically lesbian. Whether Stein envisions Jeff as a beard, a straight male, or some odd combination, she makes clear that, for Melanctha, Jeff’s fear is the rubric that decodes his argument: “…you certainly are awful scared about really feeling things way down in you, and that’s certainly the only way Dr. Campbell I can see that you can mean, by what it is you are always saying to me” (77). This fear is both productive and protective of the opacity of Jeff’s sexual desire, as is his substitution of thinking for feeling. Consider how Jeff draws a binary between (1) quiet love constrained “in a family where one does his work” and (2) excitement “in the streets” (78). Jeff does not make the traditional distinction between the madonna and the whore here, as Jeff is uncomfortable even with a whore qua whore. He is uncomfortable with excitement “in the streets” and in the sheets in and of themselves. Jeff’s binary is much better interpreted via the contemporary social construction of homosexuality. In a society that both censors and demonizes homosexuality, Jeff’s binary is the difference between (1) socially sanctioned and thus organized and comprehensible heterosexual acts, and (2) the “animal” passion of homosexual acts, which, by a necessity dictated by cultural censorship, must spring from the body, and therefore be conflated with the primitive, crude, and unknown. This binary applies to most non-normative sexuality, but close examination of Jeff’s fear of his sexuality reveals three aspects that fulfill a homosexual script particularly well. 217 First, Jeff has no language to understand such internally uncharted territory as his desire for Melanctha and hers for him: “What was it really that Melanctha wanted with him? What was it really, he, Jeff Campbell, wanted she should give him?” (98). What Jeff wants is outside his self-conception, a problem familiar to most homosexuals before they come to self-knowledge in homophobic and homosexually-censoring societies. Despite the considerable homosexuality on display throughout Three Lives, the only character who even intimates it, much less names it, is Mrs. Federner in “Anna.” Anna and Lena remain relentlessly unconscious of the erotic aspects of their homosexual desire, and Jane and Melanctha lump their lovemaking in with the rest of their erotic experience: they are conscious partisans of the broadly queer, regardless of their specifically lesbian actions. Second, Jeff hates his bodily desires: Jeff felt a strong disgust inside him; not for Melanctha herself, to him, not for himself really, in him…he only had disgust because he could never know really what it was really right to him to be always doing, in the things he had before believed in [the life without “animalistic” sexuality,] the things he had before believed for himself” (97). Jeff’s hatred of his sexual desire coincides with the symptoms of internalized homophobia. Jeff, unlike Anna, has turned his sexual desire into sexual expression; he doesn’t repress and sublimate it, but he does hate and fear it. Jeff therefore has to sabotage his relationship with Melanctha (though he doesn’t consciously want to) because it is “wrong,” and because she herself is not about to destroy it. Melanctha understands this causal chain: “I suppose, Jeff,” said Melanctha, very low and bitter, “I suppose you are always thinking, Jeff, somebody had ought to be ashamed with us two together, and you 218 certainly do think you don’t see any way to it, Jeff, for me to be feeling that way ever, so you certainly don’t see any way to it, only to do it just so often for me” (98). Jeff’s fear, incomprehension, and hatred of his sexual desire is difficult to understand in terms of a heterosexual man at the turn of the twentieth century. The only plausible reasons for Jeff’s discomfort with sex are religious objections, or an upbringing that disapproved of unmarried sex for men. Stein offers no evidence of either, and her style, which relates Jeff’s unconscious as well as his conscious mind, makes it unlikely that they would be leave no trace. By contrast, Jeff’s fear, incomprehension, and hatred of his sexual desire, as well as his use of tedious intellectual arguments to internally argue his way out of non- normative sexuality, makes a perfect fit with the generic script of the internally closeted twentieth-century lesbian. His troubles with desire are specific, standard signs of homosexual adolescence, if adolescence is understood as a state of post-pubertal flux within which humans organize and construct an understanding of their sexual desires and amorous emotions, and identity coalesces. Homosexual adolescence is usually delayed in societies that mark a firm distinction between hetero- and homosexuality, which explains why Jeff faces these issues at an unusually advanced age, just as Stein had her first sexual experience as a graduate student when most women her age would have had already had one or two children. In homosexual adolescence, sexual desires and loving emotions conflict with a normative self-conception that views such desires and emotions as abnormal, not only in society at large but also in the adolescent her- or himself. Such desires and emotions, 219 transformed and empowered by puberty, batter the previous self-conception until the adolescent internally restructures his or her identity and comes out. In highly homophobic societies, both micro and macro, such restructuring is a dangerous boon that has appreciable social and psychological costs. (Melanctha’s death—poor, bereft, and alone—offers an example of the risk of not retaining such repression.) A normative self- conception offers important shielding against a hostile environment and must be gingerly detached. Adolescents may therefore mount a fierce defense and limit their adolescence by warding off their same-sex emotions and desires through a variety of overlapping techniques that include denial, repression, the fragmentation of sexual love and desire from the rest of personality, and intellectual doublespeak. Such techniques may deny the restructuring of the personality to include homosexual love and desire altogether. This restructuring may also allow emotional love but not physical desire, as we saw in Anna, or physical desire and not emotional love, as we shall see in Herman in “The Good Lena.” Though Jeff is neither a physical adolescent nor a direct recipient of homophobia, the gravity of his crisis over his relationship with Melanctha is difficult to understand as anything but a translation of homo- to heterosexuality. Poor Jeff: “It was all so mixed up inside him. All he knew was he wanted very badly Melanctha should be there beside him, and he wanted very badly, too, always to throw her from him.” (98). But there is no reason why a heterosexual Jeff can’t have a relationship with Melanctha, no reason even why he can’t both have her “there beside him” and “throw her from him.” Jeff is a successful, single, Southern doctor. A stormy relationship with an unpresentable mistress 220 is de rigueur. 29 Jeff’s fear and hatred of physical sexual expression is pansexual as written but can be most easily understood as a homosexual translation, especially in light of the insufficiencies of this translation detailed above—and in light of its earlier, specifically lesbian model in Q.E.D.’s Adele and the historical Stein. Proto-Lesbian Trauma: Dead Babies and the Perils of Wandering Jeff’s unhappiness does not compare with Melanctha’s, whose name itself is a cognate of melancholy. 30 Some of Melanctha’s misery is beyond her control. “Melanctha had not found it easy with herself to make her wants and what she had, agree”—a reasonable difficulty for a mixed-race woman on a quest for sexual power and knowledge in a small Southern city at the turn of the twentieth century (56). Any available option confines Melanctha, and she is unwilling or unable to strike Anna’s hard bargain of sublimation and repression. In this way, Melanctha is an analogue to the beautiful, brilliant, and biracial Helga Crane in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) who travels from the Deep South to Copenhagen and back without ever finding a community, profession, and racial and economic status that doesn’t limit her unbearably. 31 The contentment of other similarly-challenged characters in both books suggests that both Helga and Melanctha are somewhat willfully unhappy, or at the very least, have internalized the social hierarchy to an extent that continually forces them to experience the trauma of being in an insecure social category. As the “life” refrains, “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble 221 (56); Melanctha always loved and wanted peace and gentleness and goodness and all her life for herself poor Melanctha could only find ways to be in trouble” (58). Miss Mathilda in “The Good Anna”—an analogue of Stein herself in her weight, iconoclasm, eventual expatriation, and collection and love of modern art—suggests the opportunity for a contemporary Southern woman to structure her life in way that pleases her, reject many of the standards and morals of contemporary society, and eventually decamp for Europe, all while happily existing in a society of apparently like-minded friends. The women’s similarity is relayed through their names: Mathilda and Melanctha share three syllables, an initial M, a final a, and almost rhyme. That said, Mathilda is a white woman who can (barely) afford servants, while Melanctha has neither her racial nor her economic advantages. She does, however, go to school until she is sixteen, “rather longer than do most of the colored children,” and presumably might go to a colored college, like Jane (61). Furthermore, Melanctha is free to leave Bridgepoint; she could easily migrate somewhere with a substantively different social hierarchy and more opportunity, as did the many African-Americans who migrated to Harlem, Chicago, or other Northern cities. Yet for Melanctha, Bridgepoint is a bridge to nowhere, a single point that revolves around her trauma. Consider the consistent failure of Melanctha’s relationships, which cannot be sufficiently explained by her social position and construction. For instance: After a painful break-up and much painful consideration, Jeff comes to a full acceptance of his love for Melanctha and what this means in terms of his self-conception. In other words, he “comes out,” only for Melanctha to reject him, much as she rejected Jane once they 222 had reached a stable relationship between equals. Melanctha then conducts two more variations of these relationships. She falls into manic love with Jem, who plans to marry Melanctha until she drives him away with the “foolish” love that overwhelms him during a financial upset (138). When he repents leaving her, Melanctha refuses to take him back, for no sensible reason. Before and after Jem, Melanctha has an intense friendship with Rose, who sees her bond with Melanctha, which is never overtly sexual, as subordinate to her heterosexual relations, and who therefore never loves Melanctha enough to be rejected in turn. Melanctha’s love objects repeat sonically as well as in their unhappy end. 32 The monosyllabic Jeff is only one consonant from Jem, and both share initial Js with Jane, which links to Rose not only syllabically but also as a standard name for African- Americans and domestic servants at this time. Furthermore, both Melanctha’s father James and his friend John have intimate (though not explicitly sexual) relations with Melanctha, as well as single-syllable names that start with J. All six names contrast with the lengthy, exotic Melanctha. Nothing rhymes with either the woman or her name, and when these monosyllabic, overly simplistic echoes of Melanctha’s unhappy internal love object falter and fail, Melanctha dies from consumption, that generic end of the romantic heroine. Melanctha’s inability to sustain an erotic or emotional relationship indexes a general inability to find consistent satisfaction or direction in most aspects of her life: “Melanctha Herbert was always losing what she had in wanting all the things she saw. Melanctha was always being left when she was not leaving others” (56). She is smart, 223 quick, and has educational opportunities, but leaves school. She finds success as a nurse, a substitute teacher, and a seamstress but wanders from profession to profession as she wanders from lover to lover. She never has or wants a child, or wonders at her fertility, which is so unlikely that it arguably serves as another lapse in the naturalism of the text, one that suggests a lesbian subtext as pregnancy does not serve as a climax to lesbian sex. Melanctha’s wandering is so consistent that it masks the stability of this wandering: Melanctha unconsciously calibrates her life for a steady state of romantic, financial, and job-related inconsistency, disappointment, frustration, and failure. Her intelligence, attractiveness, stubbornness, and charm ensure that she never hits bottom until the end of her “life,” but her internal script demands that she never finds sustained success or peace that she consciously desires. This Stein’s refrain that Melanctha “wondered, often, how she could go on living when she was so blue” (54, 60)— that Melanctha “was so blue sometimes, and wanted somebody should come and kill her” (131)—that “Melanctha would get very blue, and she would say to Rose, sure she would kill herself, for that certainly now was the best she could do” (141). Melanctha’s compulsion to recreate the rejection and unhappiness of her childhood makes such sentiments reasonable, even sensible, even though Melanctha never succumbs to them: “But Melanctha Herbert never really killed herself because she was so blue, though often she thought this would be really the best way for her to do” (147). If Melanctha is made miserable by inconsistency, why does it persist? What are the psychosexual reasons for her discontent? If Melanctha’s failed relationships with Jane, Jeff, Jem, and Rose are all echoes, then what do they repeat? In psychoanalytic 224 terms, what original psychic injury was too great to be absorbed by Melanctha’s ego, was repressed and remains unhealed, and keeps manifesting in what Freud calls “the return of the repressed,” and will continue to repeat until the trauma is consciously processed and incorporated? 33 These questions can best be approached through Melanctha’s final lover, Rose. Rose is not conventionally read as Melanctha’s lover, and it’s unlikely that Rose herself would characterize her and Melanctha’s relations as love, much less as a same-sex erotic so strong that it serves as the definitive proof of Melanctha’s same-sexual orientation. Rose is usually not considered by critics; she is noted, if at all, as a minor character, and examined in terms of the text’s racism, as the most objectionable parts of the “life” are authored in conjunction with Rose. Yet Stein makes it clear that “Rose Johnson had worked herself in to be the deepest of all Melanctha’s emotions” (146). Furthermore, Rose’s importance to Melanctha is structurally supported by the text. While James’ beating of the adolescent Melanctha is chronologically the first dramatized event in the “life,” the Rose/Melanctha relationship frames the “life” itself; Rose is not only the first character to appear in the “life” but also the last character to speak, and the last named character besides Melanctha to appear. In addition, the mystery of Melanctha’s love for Rose serves as Stein’s initial introduction of Melanctha’s point of view: Why did the subtle, intelligent, attractive half white girl Melanctha Herbert love and do for and demean herself in service to this coarse, decent, sullen, ordinary, black childish Rose, and why was this unmoral, promiscuous, shiftless Rose married, and that’s not so common either, to a good man of the negroes, while Melanctha with her white blood and attraction and her desire for a right position had not yet been really married? (54) 225 It is only when these questions have been asked that Stein assumes Melanctha’s perspective, which Stein immediately grounds in depression: “Somehow the thought of how all her world was made, filled the complex, desiring Melanctha with despair.” (54). Propinquity therefore connects Rose not only with Melanctha’s depression but also with her perspective. This is true not only in the order of representation of the contents of the “life” but also in the contents themselves. Though Melanctha’s life is pervaded by depression, she only becomes suicidal in her relationship with Rose. Stein’s above question of why Melanctha would “love and do and demean herself” for Rose can logically be extended as follows: What is the connection between Melanctha’s attachment to Rose and her despair? And why should Rose have such a great impact on Melanctha, when she is not as kind, loving, and respectable as Jeff, as rich as Jem, as experienced as Jane, or as devoted as any of the previous three? What does Rose have that the others do not? Inaccessibility. Rose is the only one of Melanctha’s adult attachments that the “subtle, intelligent, attractive” Melanctha cannot captivate with her volatile sexuality; Rose is neither dramatized nor narrated as physically intimate with Melanctha. Rose also places limits on their non-sexual attachment. Once Rose gets married, she has less and less time for Melanctha. Despite Rose’s reliance on Melanctha for domestic work— “there was Melanctha to come in every day and help to keep things neat” (55)—Rose doesn’t let her live with her and her husband, though Stein makes it clear that this arrangement would be appropriate, considering the domestic work that Melanctha does for Rose: 226 Rose Johnson never asked Melanctha to live with her in the house, now Rose was married. Rose liked to have Melanctha come all the time to help her, Rose liked to have Melanctha be almost always with her, but Rose was shrewd in her simple selfish nature, she did not ever think to ask Melanctha to live with her. (133-4) Rose’s inaccessibility provokes an uncharacteristically sustained devotion in Melanctha, who does more for Rose than she does for anyone else, and whose assistance to Rose’s wedding and domestic household is invaluable: “With Melanctha Herbert’s help to do the sewing [for the trousseau] and the nicer work, [Rose and her husband] furnished a comfortable a nice little brick house” (55). Melanctha never turns on Rose or causes her pain, as she does Jane, Jeff, and Jem. Unsurprisingly, the height of Melanctha’s devotion is coeval with Rose’s final rejection. Note here how Rose’s rejection trumps Jem’s: Melanctha Herbert never again saw Jem Richards. Melanctha never again saw Rose Johnson, and it was hard for Melanctha never any more to see her. Rose Johnson had worked in to be the deepest of all Melanctha’s emotions. (146) But why is inaccessibility so appealing to Melanctha—and is it sufficient? What are the rest of Rose’s attractions? Normativity and practicality. Rose is “hard-headed, she was decent, and she always knew what it was that she needed” (134); Rose “always knew very well what it was she wanted, and she never had any kind of trouble to perplex her” (131). Rose is even more conventional than Jeff, who as a black doctor sits somewhat askew on Bridgepoint’s order of being. Jeff falls off this scale completely by substituting a fear and hatred of his own sexuality for the expected entitlement of a successful straight man. By contrast, Rose’s normativity and practicality require definite limits on her relationship with Melanctha, due to the women’s gender and the difficulty of having a primary partner of the same sex in Baltimore at the turn of the twentieth century. Rose only engages in 227 appropriate sexual behavior: “Rose kept company, and was engaged, first to this colored man and then to that, and always she made sure she was engaged, for Rose had strong the sense of proper conduct” (55). Note here the difference between Rose’s ability to pay lip service to contemporary morality rather than Jeff’s abnormal need to take it “seriously.” Yet Rose is neither cynical nor disaffected. At the proper time, propriety motivates her marriage: “After she had lived some time this way, Rose thought it would be nice and very good in her position to get regularly really married” (61). She strengthens her social and material position traditionally, through heterosexual marriage and material comforts. Unsurprisingly, Rose finds material and social success, while Melanctha does not. Rose is also the most normative of the characters in terms of race. While Jane “was so white that hardly anyone could guess [that was black],” and Melanctha is “a graceful, pale yellow…who had been half made with real white blood,” Rose is “a real black negress” (65; 54; 53). Her racial “purity” is so strong that it transcends her upbringing. Though Rose “had been brought up quite like their own child by white folks….Her white training had made only for habits, not for nature” (53-54). Even when removed from her “nature,” Rose retains her core identity: She is a “real black” (53). Yet Rose’s ordinariness transcends Stein’s essentialism: “Rose laughed when she was happy but she had not the wide, abandoned laughter that makes the warm broad glow of negro sunshine….Hers was just ordinary, any sort of woman laughter” (53). Two orders of being are warring here. In essentialist terms, the laughter of “real black” Rose should have “negro sunshine.” The fact that she doesn’t makes her abnormal, but this broad queerness is trumped by the fact that her laughter is “ordinary, any sort of woman 228 laughter.” In other words, even when Rose is extraordinary, the “extra” can be understood as belonging to a greater order of normalcy. Rose shares this greater normativity with Melanctha’s father James, who “had never had the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to negro sunshine” (57). This common lack serves both to further normalize Rose’s lack of “authentic” laughter and to tie her to Melanctha’s childhood, which as we shall see, shaped Melanctha’s understanding of love. Furthermore, the ways in which Rose isn’t a “normal” black serve to promote her in the larger society, as Rose reminds and instructs Melanctha while discussing proper sexual behavior: “No, I ain’t no common nigger just to go around with any man, nor you Melanctha shouldn’t neither,” she said one day when she was telling the complex and less sure Melanctha what was the right way for her to do. “No Melanctha, I ain’t no common nigger to do so, for I was raised by white folks. You know very well that I’se always been engaged to [my sexual partners]” (55). Rose’s faith in the social hierarchy leaves her incapable of untoward change and profoundly stable: Rose is rose is rose. 34 She appropriately (and appropriately unsuccessfully) tries to teach Melanctha normalcy: “Rose always was telling Melanctha the right way she should do, so that she could not always be in trouble. But Melanctha Herbert could not help it, always she would find new ways to get excited” (129). Unsurprisingly, the floundering Melanctha exchanges devotion to Rose in exchange for stability and support: “Melanctha was always ready to do anything Rose wanted from her. Melanctha needed badly to have Rose always willing to let Melanctha cling to her” (131). As Rose will never fully reciprocate Melanctha’s love and need, so Melanctha runs no risk of a secure and mutually-fulfilling relationship with Rose, and can therefore 229 pledge her whole heart. In other words, Melanctha’s trauma is better embodied by her relationship with Rose than with any of her other attachments. This explains why Melanctha, though always despairing, is only suicidal when Rose treats her badly. Rose therefore provides the clearest clue to Melanctha’s original trauma, which frames Melanctha’s “life” as well as her life. Though the Rose frame of “Melanctha” has only received critical attention in terms of its racism, the beginning and end of the “life” establish Melanctha’s psychic landscape, and are vital to an understanding of its heroine’s character. The “life” begins as follows: Rose Johnson made it very hard to bring her baby to its birth. Melanctha Herbert who was Rose Johnson’s friend, did everything that any woman could. She tended Rose, and she was patient, submissive, soothing, and untiring, while the sullen, childish, cowardly, black Rosie grumbled and fussed and howled and made herself to be an abomination and like a simple beast. The child though it was healthy after it was born, did not live long. Rose Johnson was careless and negligent and selfish, and when Melanctha had to leave for a few days, the baby died. Rose Johnson had liked the baby well enough and perhaps she just forgot it for awhile, anyway the baby was dead and Rose and Sam her husband were very sorry but then these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint, that they neither of them thought about it very much. (53) This is not only racist but in naturalist terms, ridiculous. While infant mortality was pronounced in turn-of-the-century southern African-American communities, the death of children by “forgetting” was not, especially the firstborn of married couples. How then do we interpret this fantastic beginning to “Melanctha?” Especially when viewed against the usual mimesis of the rest of Three Lives, which is so committed to an accurate portrayal of its characters’ phenomenological experience that the text breaks with traditional narrative in its representation of internal sensations and thoughts? I read Stein’s break with naturalism here as I did the heterosexual improbabilities of Jeff 230 and Melanctha’s relationship: The realist space-time of the text is being warped from bearing a symbolic, psychic weight. If the improbabilities of Jeff and Melanctha’s relationship indicate an incomplete and imperfect translation of the specifically lesbian, then what does the improbability of the death of Rose’s child indicate? Who is this dead baby, abandoned by its mother, kept alive by Melanctha, and dying from neglect when she leaves? And why is Melanctha assuming responsibility for Rose’s baby in the first place? Rose’s disinterest in Melanctha and Melanctha’s corresponding devotion, as well as Rose’s intense normativity, neatly reference Melanctha’s parents, James and the unnamed “Mis” Herbert, and help explain the dead baby that opens the “life.” (Rose and James’s similar lack of “negro laughter” is another link.) Melanctha’s parents have even greater limits on their affection for Melanctha than Rose: They never “like” her, while Rose “liked the baby well enough.” For example, “Mis” Herbert remains indifferent throughout her fatal illness to Melanctha, despite her daughter’s excellent nursing: Melanctha took good care of her mother. She did anything that any woman could, she tended and soothed and helped her pale yellow mother, and she worked hard in every way to take care of her, and make her dying easy. But Melanctha did not in these days like her mother any better, and her mother never cared much for this daughter who was always a hard daughter to manage, and who had a tongue that always could be nasty. (69) Stein embodies this mutual disaffection in one of her refrains: “Melanctha had not liked her mother very well “ (56). But how mutual is it? Psychologists of every currently active school, from psychoanalysts to both humanistic and cognitive psychologists, agree that infants are hardwired to bond with their primary caretakers. A therapist considering Melanctha’s depression would consider 231 the pervasiveness of Melanctha’s depression throughout her life to indicate an origin in Melanctha’s childhood. Those therapists interested in how Melanctha developed such habits would almost certainly explore her relationship with her primary caretaker: her mother, not only as according to social norms but also because “Melanctha’s father only used to come to where Melanctha and her mother lived, once in a while” (56). If Melanctha and her mother never “liked” each other, the therapist would almost certainly point out that, since all children bond with their primary caretakers, the reason for such a persistent, long-lasting dislike must lie either in the mother herself or in grave external factors that are not in evidence in the case history. For now, I want to table the question of what soured the maternal relationship and focus on the fact that the intensity of Melanctha’s feelings for Rose, as well as the fact that Rose’s final rejection frames Melanctha’s “life” and effectively kills her, proves that Rose is the closest echo of whatever original love inspired Rose’s relationships with Jane, Jeff, Jem, and Rose. This in turn explains why Rose abandons the baby at the start of the story. This baby only survives when Melanctha cares for it because the baby is Melanctha; Rose’s neglect of this baby is a repetition of Melanctha’s mother’s neglect of baby Melanctha, and how Melanctha had to parent herself. When she could not, the baby “died.” Melanctha experienced a trauma that could not be incorporated, and therefore split off the psychic pain from her consciousness, though the fragment still leaks into her consciousness to manifest in her erotic relationships. The story begins and ends with Rose’s abandonment of the baby because the “life” is the story of that abandoned baby, and at the story’s end, when Rose abandons Melanctha as she did the baby, Melanctha is 232 fatally wounded. In Stein’s relation of the definitive break-up between the women, when Rose dresses Melanctha down and refuses to let her in her house, the maternal/infantile overtones are unmistakable: Melanctha stood like one dazed, she did not know how to bear this blow that almost killed her. Melanctha Herbert was all sore and bruised inside her. Melanctha had always needed Rose to believe her, Melanctha needed Rose always to let her cling to her, Melanctha wanted badly to have somebody who could make her feel always a little safe inside her, and now Rose had sent her from her. Melanctha wanted Rose more than she had ever wanted all the others. Rose always was so simple, solid, decent, for her. And now Rose had cast her from her. Melanctha was lost, and all the world went whirling in a mad weary dance around her. Melanctha Herbert never had any strength alone ever to feel safe inside her. And now Rose Johnson had been cast from her, and Melanctha could never any more be near her. Melanctha Herbert knew now, way inside her, that she was lost, and nothing any more could ever help her. (145) Here, at the end of her life and the beginning of her “life,” Melanctha achieves the closest repetition of her initial trauma. All the world is now a bad object, and Melanctha’s ego is laid waste. Unfortunately, such perfect reenactment does not lead to Melanctha’s healing, but to the long-delayed physical injury that reflects Melanctha’s original psychic injury: the lover’s fatal complaint of consumption, which leads directly to her death. When James beat Melanctha, he starts the dynamo that pushes Melanctha into sexual knowledge and started her wandering. When Rose “beats” Melanctha, she pushes her only to her death. Melanctha can’t transmute her pain into sexualized knowledge— can’t, for instance, ask herself why Rose upsets her so much more than her other lovers. She can’t get any help, either. She has outstripped the knowledge of lay teachers such as Jane, and doctors such as Jeff have proven woefully inadequate for aiding Melanctha. She is unlikely to turn to the church, the most socially-acceptable source of counseling, 233 and it is difficult to conceive of pastoral advice at this time that would be friendly to extra-marital sexuality, much less same-sexuality. And there are no psychoanalytic options in turn-of-the-century Baltimore, much less in the African-American community. What is the difference between Melanctha’s beating by her father and her rejection by Rose? First, though James’s beating is physically painful, it isn’t emotional rejection. A beating may be negative rather than positive attention, but it can easily be parsed as proof of an emotional bond nonetheless, and can so easily be a source of sexual pleasure that it comprises part of the sexual practice of many adults. Second, Melanctha’s physical beating coincides with her puberty, when a child’s emotional architecture is being reshaped by physicalized sexual desire, and when her robust physicality and mental state are primed for the ordinary difficulties of becoming sexually mature. Most importantly, I believe that James’s beating is itself a variation of an even more original psychic injury for Melanctha, and that Rose’s gender and her coldness (as opposed to James’s maleness and heat) brings Melanctha so close to her original trauma that she cannot transmute it and recover, as she does from her other romantic upsets. What is that original injury? What happened between Melanctha and her parents? Stein writes that “Melanctha Herbert had not loved herself in childhood. All her youth was bitter to remember” (56). As Stein offered no details of Melanctha’s childhood besides her relations with her parents, we must conclude that such bitterness is coeval with poor parent-child relations. Stein writes twice that “Melanctha had not loved her father and her mother and they had found it very troublesome to have her” (56; 57)— which as I have shown, must indicate a defensive reaction on Melanctha’s part rather 234 than an original antipathy, as infants invariably become attached to their primary provider. Melanctha must sense her parents’ discomfort with her from an early age and reflect it back. This sense of parental dissatisfaction is soon substantiated by a spoken rejection made even worse by not being issued in anger, and thus easily explained away, but overheard in a private discussion between the parents: One day Melanctha was real little, and she heard her ma say to her pa, it was awful sad to her, Melanctha had not been the one the Lord had took from them stead of the little brother who was dead in the house there from fever (133). “Mis” Herbert’s desire for a phantom child of an opposite sex—a child who couples Melanctha’s traits with an “appropriate” gender, a child who will “fall in love” with his mother as little boys (and not little girls) should—is common in the parents of queer children of every sexual stripe, from homosexual to transsexual and beyond. In this sense, “Mis” Herbert is identical to the iconic “bad mother” of Western lesbian literature, Anna Gordon of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), who never reconciles herself to her daughter Stephen’s “inversion.” Luckily, Stephen has a much more loving and supportive father than Melanctha, and though Stephen is never able to sustain a romantic relationship, her strong identification with her father helps her sustain a considerably stronger sense of self than the endlessly “wandering” Melanctha. By contrast, Stein makes it clear that Melanctha’s parents neither like nor love her. The light of all the queer registers thus discussed in Three Lives illuminates the strong possibility that Melanctha’s poor relationship with her family stems from her status as a queer, possibly protolesbian child. 235 The study of gay and lesbian children has been historically hampered by the traditional association of homosexuality with pedophilia and “recruiting” or “corrupting” youth, which made it impractical for psychologists before the 1970s to study proto- homosexuality in prepubescent children, especially as those most likely to do such work without viewing such childhood queerness as a developmental abnormality were likely to be gay or lesbian themselves, and thus were already somewhat at risk for professional censure. In Chapter 2, I discussed how the American Psychological Association’s delisting of homosexuality as a mental illness did not extend to children, as seen in the concurrent listing of Gender Identity Disorder, still on the books, which considers “cross- gendered” traits in children, including same-sex interest, as a mental illness. I did this in the context of protogay readings of Truman Capote’s novel Other Voices, Other Rooms and short story “Miriam.” While Capote portrays the difficulties of the protogay child in terms of the gothic and the supernatural, Stein puts them in the realistic context of naturalist literature. Melanctha’s relationship with her mother is emblematic of the frequently-fraught relationship of the protolesbian with her mother, and how protogay children queer the usual developmental script, leaving their parents frequently confused, disgusted, and hostile. This parental displeasure can be explained by psychoanalytic theorists who have returned to Freud’s initial decoupling of social normativity and psychosexual progression to claim that though all children do develop and come to a mature psychosexual organization, there are a variety of adult organizations, some of which are considerably less fixed than others, and some of which continue to change. Theorists who are 236 interested in a specifically homosexual developmental teleology tend to “flip” genders when discussing the difference between the psychosexual development of straight and gay children. Crudely speaking, lesbians identify with their fathers and desire their mothers, instead of the reverse. 35 This often confuses parents, who have the opposite expectation, and causes much unhappiness at home. Melanctha and her parents certainly have the unhappiness and ill-fit typical of such families, but do they have the other characteristics of parents unhappy to have a proto-lesbian daughter? Consider the adolescent Melanctha’s relationship with her father, James: “Melanctha was always abusing her father and yet she was just like him, and really she admired him so much” (71). Melanctha’s similarity to her father is a refrain of her “life”: “the real power in Melanctha’s nature came through her robust and unpleasant and very unendurable black father” (56). Melanctha identifies with her father’s masculine attributes much more than her father’s femininity: Melanctha had a strong respect for any kind of successful power. It was this that always kept Melanctha nearer, in her feeling toward her virile and unendurable black father, then she ever was in her feeling for her pale yellow, sweet-appearing mother. (60) Melanctha’s identification with her father is especially marked in the context of her similarities with her mother, who is similarly attractive and pleasant, and who very much like Melanctha had “always been a little wandering and mysterious and uncertain in her ways” (56). Nonetheless, “[Melanctha’s] feeling was really closer to her black coarse father, than her father had ever been toward her pale yellow, sweet-appearing mother. The things she had in her of her mother never made her feel respect” (56). Melanctha’s father is both troubled and responsive to his daughter’s identification, and the parent- 237 child relationship fits the generic script of a father with a teenage boy much better than that of a teenage girl. He treats his daughter as he would a boy: He was “brutal and rough to his one daughter, but then she was a most disturbing child to manage” (57). As the only attributes of the childish Melanctha that we are offered are her relations with her parents, it seems reasonable that her queering of heterosexual identification and desire causes the “disturbance” that provokes James to treat her “brutal and rough,” as if Melanctha were a boy. Other details of teen Melanctha are similarly “male.” She “had a break neck courage….she loved to do wild things, to ride the horses and to break and tame then” (57). While the love of horses is a cliché of female adolescence, Melanctha takes it unusually far. As we have seen, the first sustained dramatization of young Melanctha is in conjunction with these horses, when James beats due to her close friendship with John, a nearby coachman and friend of her father’s who consistently tries to soften her father towards Melanctha. One night when Melanctha was “a well grown girl of twelve and just beginning to be a woman,” James detects a sexual register to the relations of his daughter and the coachman: “John grew more and more admiring as he talked half to himself, half to the father, of the virtues and the sweetness of Melanctha” (57; 59). James pulls a razor on John, and later beats Melanctha, who does not understand why she is beaten: “Now when her father began to fiercely assail her, she did not know what it was that he was so furious to force from her” (59). What is going on here? Why is James so mad to see that his friend thinks so well of Melanctha? 238 The most obvious answer is the traditional answer. James is mad because he believes his daughter has a suitor. When John “talked half to himself, half to the father, of the virtues and sweetness of Melanctha,” he indicated that he has feelings for Melanctha that he doesn’t yet consciously know. Discussing his high regard for Melanctha puts him into a reverie: He grows “more and more admiring” as he discusses her, as if he is only now realizing how well he thinks of her. That’s why he’s talking to himself; he either doesn’t yet know this information, or he so enjoys his feelings that their narration gives him pleasure. Either way, it seems to be that John is talking half to himself, and getting more and more excited about Melanctha as he does so, that cues James that he has a reason to slice John’s face. Why then does James beat Melanctha? Is it that he cannot conceive that the coachman cannot have such an interest in his daughter unless she encourages him? Or is it that the thought of Melanctha as a sexual object infuriates James? We know from Stein that Melanctha has no conscious amorous designs or perceptions of John—that when her beats her, trying to force some kind of confession, “she did not really know what it was that he was so furious to force from her” (59). James appears to misread Melanctha’s identification with the coachman as desire—a misreading that the coachman seems to share. Somehow, the idea of Melanctha becoming a sexual being infuriates James. Why? On the basis of his previous hostile behavior to his daughter, it seems much more likely that he views any sexuality of Melanctha’s as perverse, rather than the more conventional reaction of jealousy for his daughter’s attention to another man. His knowledge that she 239 is somehow “wrong”—a knowledge that seems to extend to her infancy—explains why he would logically think that any sexuality of Melanctha’s is likely to be “wrong.” Melanctha herself views her beating as a rite of passage that is most easily understood as a passage to “manliness”: she “began to know her power, the power she often felt stirring within her and which she now knew she could use to make her stronger” (59). She masters her father, and matches his toughness and violence with her own. Melanctha breaks horses; she is not broken herself, and we see here the first instance of her pleasure in remaining impervious to a loved one’s attention, which she repeats with Jane, Jeff, and Jem. She has proven herself stronger than her old man, and he loses influence. Stein writes “James did not win this fight with his daughter” and then only mentions him again in retrospect or in terms of his present absence (59). The evidence that Melanctha desires rather than identifies with her mother is primarily negative: her and her mother’s mutual dislike, and desire to retain only the polite form of a parent-child relationship. Such an antipathy must originate with the mother, and probably stems from Melanctha’s somehow being “wrong.” Again, there seems to be no reason for this dislike; Melanctha is wrong, is “disturbing,” rather than acts disturbing. Note, however, how well Melanctha’s first lover relates to her mother. Both Jane and “Mis” Herbert are senior to Melanctha, and hold a parental role. Both Jane and “Mis” Herbert are light-skinned; both “wander”; and both are abandoned by their darker-skinned, peripatetic lovers: Jane by Melanctha, and “Mis” Herbert by James. Even the seeming differences between them can be reconciled. While “hardened” Jane would seem to be the opposite of “sweet” “Mis” Herbert, the symmetry of this opposition 240 is suspicious, and points to substitution and displacement of the love object with its reverse. The reversal is bifocal, as sweet “Mis” Herbert is actually a hostile, unloving mother, while hard Jane is enraptured with Melanctha. In short, there is ample evidence that Melanctha seems “wrong” to both of her parents, and their sense that she has an unusual psychic make-up in terms of desire and identification offers evidence that the family’s friction is a result of her same-sex orientation. This result becomes even more likely in the light of Anna and Lena, who also have poor relationships with their biological families. Both have no regret at leaving their parents at a young age to immigrate. Anna’s relationship with her only relatives in town, her baker brother and his family, is limited to the free bread he gives her; she has no family feeling for his children, though out of guilt she buys them things. She reserves her affection, however, for the children of her great romance, Mrs. Lehntman. Furthermore, Anna actively dislikes her sister-in-law, Mrs. Federner, who is the only character in Anna’s “life” to name the sexual aspects of Anna and Mrs. Lehntman’s romance, an interesting correspondence with James’s perception of his daughter’s sexuality. Lena’s relations with her family are similar. She is “not an important daughter in [her] family” (153) and the disinterest is mutual: Lena did not like her german life very well. It was not the hard work but the roughness that disturbed her. The people were not gentle...and would lay hold of her and roughly tease her. They were good people enough around her, but it was all harsh and dreary for her. (153) Stein never shows Lena communicating with or even thinking of her family once she emigrates in the care of her aunt. Though Lena’s sense of duty to the aunt is absolute, she has no affection for her—and this duty comes to destroy her. 241 Melanctha’s infantile trauma bears on the question of her sexuality, her depression, and her inability to form a stable relationship. In psychoanalytic terms, there are three possible explanations for her Melanctha’s sexual “wandering” and the unhappiness it brings her. In traditional Freudian terms, Melanctha’s polymorphous sexual practice indicates an arrested phase of psychosexual development: a failure to progress to an exclusively heterosexual practice with firm attachments. In this schema, Melanctha is a developmentally disabled pervert. Queer psychoanalytic critics who have uncoupled normative values and psychosexual “progression” might, by contrast, see Melanctha’s lability as her mature organization. If so, Melanctha is sexually “queer,” and her problems result from the difficulty of expressing and embodying this queerness. A third possibility is that Melanctha has stalled on her way towards a mature, exclusively lesbian formulation. In the first and last schemas, Melanctha’s trouble stems from an inability to organize a stable, fixed, psychic landscape. In the second and third schemas, Melanctha’s travail is created by the social oppression of bisexuals and the otherwise polymorphously perverse in turn-of-the-century Baltimore. In many respects, the heteronormativity of her environment makes the difference between the lived experience of options two and three moot. What after all is a lesbian in Stein’s Bridgepoint? How is she constructed and understood by herself and by others? We see from Mrs. Federner’s reading of the eros between Anna and Mrs. Lehntman that same-sexuality can be recognized and named. We also see from Melanctha and Jane that same-sexuality is physically practiced, and from both couples that same-sexual romantic, passionate love is emotionally possible. 242 Yet none of these women conceptualize themselves as lesbians, though Anna’s homosexual orientation is entirely fixed. Does Three Lives therefore argue that Anna is a stunted lesbian whose physicality is repressed by internalized and external homophobia? Are both Anna and Melanctha happily liminal—Anna with an eros whose physical manifestation is restricted to nagging and bossing, Melanctha with an eros whose physicality is inextricable from instability—or are both struggling to individuate as adult lesbians who express themselves physically and emotionally with a same-sex partner? In “Melanctha,” Stein’s decision to encode the lesbianism of Q.E.D. and Fernhurst in heterosexuality makes such questions impossible to definitively answer. But consider why Stein encodes Melanctha’s same-sexuality in heterosexuality in the first place. Q.E.D. and Fernhurst were unpublishable, due to their lesbian content. Stein was determined to publish Three Lives, and so she had to encode Melanctha’s same- sexuality. As Anna and Lena are not sexually active, Stein does not need to encode their lesbianism in heterosexual terms; she may trust that the phenomenon of the apparitional lesbian will keep the same-sexuality of these ‘lives’ from easy detection, despite such blatancies as Anna’s “great romance.” As Melanctha is sexually active, Stein must translate her sex into heterosexual terms if she wants to publish Three Lives. Stein doesn’t need to transmute all of Melanctha’s sexuality, as we see in the portrayal of Melanctha’s relationship with Jane; Stein just needs to translate enough for the apparitional lesbian to unfurl her cloak. The historical focus upon Jeff at the expense of Jane shows the success of Stein’s gambit—a gambit that leaves the reader of Three Lives with the apparitional lesbian, who can only be detected and discussed through suspicious 243 presences and absences, ectoplasms such as the ill fit of Jeff and Melanctha’s relationship with heterosexual construction. That said, Stein’s own mature psychosexual organization as a lesbian had moved from internal narration to physical dramatization by the time of her composition of Three Lives in 1905-6 (she would meet Toklas the following year), which offers some evidence for Melanctha as an unindividuated lesbian rather than a socially oppressed, polymorphously perverse queer. Three Lives’ literary antecedents—Q.E.D. (1903) and Fernhurst (1904)—also point to the specifically lesbian rather than the broadly queer. Adele, the heroine of Q.E.D., develops a lesbian practice and identity as she realizes her lesbian orientation. Helen and Mabel, the other women in Q.E.D.’s triangle, already have a fixed lesbian orientation. 36 Fernhurst, too, affirms a same-sex object choice. Miss Bruce, one half of an academic lesbian couple, has an affair with Redfern, a married male professor, but eventually returns to Miss Thornton, the Dean of Fernhurst College. 37 The short novel is a roman à clef based on a romantic triangle at Bryn Mawr College that included a friend of Stein’s. 38 Miss Bruce is a stand-in for Mary Gwinn, an English professor in an established relationship with college president Helen Carey Thomas, and Redfern is a stand-in for Alfred Hodder, a married college friend of Stein and her brother. Hodder came to Bryn Mawr to teach philosophy and became Gwinn’s lover. After six years of scandal, Hodder and Gwinn abandoned their partners and were married in Paris. Stein rewrites the history underlying this to make homosexuality a final destination, rather than a stop on the road to heterosexuality. Stein made this revision despite the fact that it made Fernhurst considerably less saleable. As Stein’s first novel revolved around a 244 protolesbian realizing her orientation, and as her second resolved with the affirmation of homosexual object choice, the track record points to a reading of Melanctha—like the other heroines of Three Lives—as specifically protolesbian, rather than broadly queer. Last, Melanctha’s persistent wandering, like her depression and discontent, seem to emanate from an early psychic wounding, which argues against polymorphous perversity as an end to itself for this particular character. Such differentiations become both more important and more difficult in the final life, “The Gentle Lena.” No Bargain at All: “The Gentle Lena” and the Limits of Lesbian Discourse “The Gentle Lena” is the last and shortest of Stein’s three “lives,” and receives the least critical attention. The “life,” like all of Three Lives, does not follow a linear chronology. At the youngest age at which Stein shows her, Lena is a seventeen-year-old peasant in the south of Germany who catches the eye of her aunt, visiting from the United States (153). Lena is so quiet, respectful, and open to direction and criticism that Aunt Haydon is inspired to sponsor her immigration. Aunt Haydon might have read her plot in any number of popular novels of Immigrant Girls Making Good. After emigrating, “Lena could first go out to service, and learn how to do things, and then, when she was a little older, Mrs. Haydon could get her a good husband” (153). Haydon pays for Lena’s passage, and finds her a good position as a nanny and maid-of-all-work. Lena works under a cook who is an analogue of the Good Anna. The cook demands perfect service behavior but provides kindness as well as scoldings. Lena is a hard worker, attentive to the cook’s instructions and attached to the children she looks after. She even has a slight 245 social life with other servants whom she meets when taking her charges to the park, though she cannot spend her free days with them. Instead, she is obliged to spend her free days with her Aunt Haydon and her abusive Haydon cousins. Even so, Lena’s four years in service are the best years of her life. Mrs. Haydon then arranges for Lena to marry Herman Kreder, a quiet, financially stable clockmaker who lives with his parents. Lena only shows interest in her wedding clothes, and Herman jilts Lena, but Aunt Haydon and the Kreders finally prevail. The young couple lives with Herman’s parents, and Lena’s mother-in-law harasses her into distraction and depression; Mrs. Kreder, unlike the cook, does not soften her criticism with affection and praise. Lena soon declines. Her indolence and depression, though appropriate for the slovenly Kreder home, dismays the cook, who is now Lena’s only contact outside the house. With Lena married, Aunt Haydon considers her obligation to Lena over, and Lena lacks the wherewithal to maintain her friendship with the other servant girls. Once Lena has a child, Herman, concerned that his wife is so listless and unresponsive, moves his family into their own house. Nonetheless, Lena flags further, and as she silently bears more babies, Herman takes on more of the housework and childcare. Lena grows so inert and withdrawn that when she dies in the stillbirth of her fourth child, her death barely touches Herman and the children. Only the cook mourns. Mrs. Haydon’s plan for Lena leads not to happiness but obliteration. “The Gentle Lena” is therefore a realist check on Aunt Haydon’s happy plot of successful immigration, assimilation, and embodiment of the hegemonic values of the United States. 246 The enormity of the failure of Haydon’s plot comes not from poor construction but from Lena’s incompatibility with the plot, especially with the commandment of compulsory heterosexuality and the demand for heteronormativity. 39 By normative standards, Lena’s life turns out considerably better than it was likely to in Germany. She immigrates, finds a good job with a demanding but supportive boss, and then marries into the lower middle class. In Lena’s own terms, however, her aunt destroys her. In another sense, however, Lena has been laid waste before she meets her aunt. Her extreme passivity and almost complete lack of love objects indicate a bombed-out psyche: a fragmented ego that isn’t sufficiently organized to pursue desire, and a repression so great that her desires can’t burst forth in an uncontrolled way, as infants’ do. In this section, I will show that Lena’s almost entirely repressed homosexual desires—the key to her oddly passive personality—can be detected in three registers: (1) the narrative erotics of the “life,” (2) direct evidence, and (3) the trace of the apparitional lesbian. Lena’s homosexuality also explains why being a wife and mother kills her, and why she, like Anna and Melanctha, has such a negative relationship with her biological family. Against the delicacy of Lena’s homoerotics, I contrast the strength of Herman’s homosexuality and interpret this gendered difference as a corollary to the historical difference between male and female homosexual identity in American culture, as well as a way for Stein to express Lena’s sexuality without breaking a naturalistic portrayal of a character whose sexuality is almost completely shut down. To close the chapter, I consider Lena in the context of Anna and Melanctha, and discuss how all three “lives” make a composite case study of the psychosexual and material damage wrought upon 247 women with a same-sexual orientation by a culture hostile not only to lesbian identity but also to female same-sex desire when it is not in the service of men. Though many narratives of this time detail women’s inability to control their lives, much less achieve their desires, Lena’s “life” is unusual in that not only her desires but also the most rudimentary consciousness of her desires as well as any movement towards or in reaction against these desires are beyond her. “The Gentle Lena” is more than what Karin Cope calls “a chronicle of the risks of passive pursuit of conventionality, of the deadliness of doing what one ought,” as even a passive pursuit requires will, assent, comprehension, and a sense of loss when one’s own desires do not coincide with convention (108). Lena, however, lacks these attributes. She is so passive, and her sense of self is so slight, that it is much easier to say what she does not desire than to say what she does, and impossible to discuss her erotic and romantic life in terms of conscious action or self-knowledge, as her “life” offers no evidence that Lena ever actively desires. As we shall see, the one time that she feels a “gentle stir” of desire, she feels it as something outside herself, something she cannot name (154). While Melanctha actively pursues sexual knowledge, and Anna knows and treasures her romance, Lena doesn’t even dream. She wants nothing. By contrast, consider Helga Crane of Quicksand (1928), who also ends buried in an enervating morass of marriage and children. 40 Helga, unlike Lena, is a creature of enormous, conflicting desires and discontent. Like so many literary heroines, she wants so much that she cannot settle for the limited rewards available to women in a highly- gendered society. Helga tries out a variety of roles as an adult woman, all of which she 248 initially likes before she feels imprisoned by them, and all of which she escapes until she has children, as she is unable to abandon them. By contrast, Lena is content before her marriage and never after. She is specifically injured by active heterosexuality, unlike Helga, who gains great pleasure from heterosexual acts, and who objects to the strict categorization of identity by race and gender more than to any specific category. Helga would be unsuitable for Mrs. Haydon’s immigration plot; she is not, like Lena, “so still and docile, she would never want to do things her own way” (153). Lena’s meekness is so extreme that it provides no allowance for desire whatsoever, much less for sex or romance. She is “willing to go” to America because “she did not like her german life very well”—an extraordinarily weak reaction for a seventeen-year-old about to emigrate and leave her immediate family, probably forever, near the turn of the twentieth century (153). Lena cannot be excited, because anticipation requires a sense of self sufficient to anticipate a future for that self, which Lena lacks: all was “harsh and dreary for her [in Germany, yet] Lena did not really know that she did not like it. She did not know that she was always dreamy and not there” (153-4). Lena has emotions, desires, and interests but doesn’t know them, much less allow for them. Her sense of self—her ego—is too weak. The depth of what I would call Lena’s contentment if contentment didn’t imply a comprehension and self-satisfaction that Lena lacks—or acquiescence if acquiescence didn’t require conscious agreement and acceptance—or obedience if obedience didn’t suggest the possibility of its opposite—can be seen when her aunt scolds her for being insufficiently excited for her arranged marriage. Lena placidly replies: “I didn’t hear you 249 say you wanted I should say anything to you. I didn’t know you wanted me to say nothing. I do whatever you tell me its right for me to do. I marry Herman Kreder, if you want me” (158). Lena’s ego is so delicate that it’s essentially deliquescent: there’s almost no Lena to speak of. Such deliquescence has a defensive function for Lena, generally in avoiding the difficulty of self-assertion and protest by a teenage immigrant servant, and specifically in blunting the face of her American cousins’ cruelty: “Lena in her unsuffering and unexpectant patience never really knew that she was slighted” (155); “Lena never got mad, or even had sense enough to know that they were all making an awful fool of her” (156). Yet Lena’s detachment and docility is too profound to be simply a defense mechanism. Even consummate servants Anna and Félicité have a strong sense of self and of what they are and are not willing to do. Certainly neither would agree to an arranged marriage without considerable thought. And Melanctha won’t even agree to an unarranged marriage to Jem, a man that she loves. Though Anna entirely represses her physical sexuality, and though Melanctha’s wandering never allows her contentment, both women have definite egos and personalities, even if parts of their selves stay beyond their ken. Lena’s only strong sensations or emotions in the “life” are pain and shame. Lena doesn’t mind being jilted until the next day on the bus, when she realizes “it was a disgrace for a girl to be left by a man on the very day she was married” and breaks into tears—not out of disappointment, but out of embarrassment (160). Lena suffers greatly from the physical pain of the ocean crossing, when “she was sure that she would die,” and of the pregnancies and childbirths that eventually kill her (154). Even pain and illness 250 doesn’t give Lena a hard edge. She “lost all her little sense of being in the suffering” on the crossing, and this “little sense of being” entirely disintegrates under the pressure of childrearing (154). As Lena continues to have children, she “did not seem to notice very much when they hurt her, and she never seemed to feel very much now about anything that happened to her” (173). Her death in her last confinement is suitably diffuse: “When it was all over Lena had died, too, and nobody knew just how it happened to her” (174). Lena’s termination is so unimportant that it doesn’t even end her “life.” Lena not only feels sick, miserable, and verging on death more than she feels well, happy, and full of life, but she also feels sick, miserable, and verging on death more intensely than she ever feels well, happy, and full of death. To see Lena when she is most well, most happy, and most characteristically “herself,” we need to resort to a structural analysis. None of the three “lives” have a linear narrative, so all have two beginnings, one textual, the other chronological. The chronological beginning narrates the first time that the heroine’s psychic development and material circumstances assume the form that they will hold throughout the life. The chronological beginning of “The Good Anna” is the teenage Anna’s refusal to follow her German mistress’s instructions to do something outside what Anna sees as her proper place. This refusal shows the strength of Anna’s will, and her commitment to an ideology of propriety and defined social roles and behaviors that outstrips her actual material circumstances: Anna does not obey her mistress, but Anna’s idea of how a mistress and a servant should properly act. As a direct result of her defiance, Anna emigrates to the United States. 251 Similarly, the chronological beginning of “Melanctha” dramatizes her first steps on the wandering path that she follows throughout the “life.” She is placed on this path by her father, who beats Melanctha for sexually encouraging his friend. While any encouragement on Melanctha’s part was unconscious, the beating makes Melanctha sexually conscious and begins her quest to understand and embody her sexuality. The beginning of “The Gentle Lena” does not indicate a similar psychic development, as Lena does not have the capacity for Melanctha’s sophistication of self-awareness and self- consciousness. (“The Good Lena” offers no instances of Lena gaining personal insight.) Instead, the chronological beginning of Lena’s “life” dramatizes her reaction to an enormous change in her material circumstances: the passivity and lack of affect with which she follows her aunt’s plan and leaves her family and native country. This beginning also illustrates how Lena is wiling to pursue happiness if it is planned out and placed in front of her—for she does want to emigrate—but not to actively pursue it herself, which would require not only consciousness of what she wants but also will and action, both of which are beyond her. If the chronological beginnings of the “lives” are portraits of how the heroine’s psyches and material circumstances are first configured in the form that will determine the course of their adult lives, then the textual beginnings of the “lives” are miniature portraits of the heroines’ psychosocial dynamics in maturity, and how these internal forces typically play out. “The Good Anna” begins with Anna’s fearsome reputation for bargaining on her mistress’s behalf among the shopkeepers, and progresses to the history of her problems with and scoldings of underservants. This beginning illustrates how 252 Anna has traded the opportunity for physical sexuality for the power and security she wields as a proper servant, and exposes the pleasure she gets from being an enforcer of hegemonic behavior in others as well as herself. “Melanctha” begins with the death of Rose’s baby and the question of why Melanctha is so devoted to Rose: a portrait of Melanctha’s need to be in an unstable, unfulfilling relationship, and of the parental neglect that created this need. What then is the literal beginning of the Lena’s “life,” which should, as it did for Anna and Melanctha, most perfectly encapsulate her psychosocial dynamic? In other words, what does Stein offer as an example of Lena when she is most herself? “The Gentle Lena” begins with Lena happily in service, four years after her immigration. This was “a peaceful life for Lena, almost as peaceful as a pleasant leisure” (150). After a few paragraphs that narrate Lena’s contentment with her job and establish her relationship with the Good-Anna-esque cook who “scolded Lena a great deal” and “scolded so for Lena’s good,” the narrative dramatizes Lena’s sole desire in the course of her “life”: the company of the other servant girls, “all them that made the pleasant, lazy crowd, that watch the children in the sunny afternoons out in the park” (149). Though they all tease her, and her three particular friends “always worked together to confuse her…Still it was pleasant” (149). Lena’s pleasure with these girls shines bright in her “life”; she uncharacteristically wants to spend time with her clique, though she often cannot exercise this desire as her aunt expects her to spend her free weekends with the family: Lena would have liked much better to spend her Sundays with the girls she always sat with, and who often asked her, and who teased her and made a gentle 253 stir within her, but it never came to Lena’s unexpectant and unsuffering german nature to do something different from what was expected of her. (154-5) This “gentle stir” is the height of Lena’s feeling life—and these girls are also the only characters willing to take Lena’s part in any action, or even emotion, that extends past obedient subservience, with the exception of the cook’s grudging sympathy for Lena’s fatal decline. The clique sympathizes with Lena’s mistreatment by the Haydons—“How could she keep on going [to the Haydons] so much when they all always acted as though she was just dirt to them”—and when Lena’s fiancée runs away on the night before their marriage, “the girls Lena sat with were very sorry to see her look so sad with her trouble” (162). Mary, the only named girl, not only sticks up for Lena but also tries to get her to exhibit some sense of self and pride, in a speech appropriate for a teenager of today who tries to buck up her friend: “It was good riddance Lena had of that Herman Kreder and his stingy, dirty parents, and if Lena didn’t stop crying about it,—Mary would just naturally despise her” (163). Yet despite Lena’s “gentle stir” for the clique that gives her such support, Lena, after her marriage, never any more saw the girls she always used to sit with. She had no way to see them, and it was not in Lena’s nature to search out ways to see them…nor did she ever now think much of the days when she had been used to see them. (170). Despite her three friends’ slow fade from Lena’s consciousness, they remain the only people for whom Lena feels even a “gentle stir”; she never evinces any desire for anyone else in the course of her “life.” She likes things, like the new dresses and hats Mrs. Haydon buys for her small trousseau, and she gets unhappy when she is scolded, and she 254 sometimes cries. But she does not love either her birth family, her husband, or her children, and she never feels desire for anyone besides the three servant girls. The slender reed of this homoerotic desire is a sturdy bough in the context of Lena’s stunted emotional life, and the foundation for my thesis that Lena’s incoherence resolves the lesbian chord initiated by the fierce constraints of Anna and sustained by the unhappy freedoms of Melanctha. I agree with Wagner-Martin that Lena’s “life” is a feminist warning: an admonitory narrative about power within marriage, the power of heterosexual culture [whose] implications are frightening: that women deserve to make their own choices about sexuality, marriage, and motherhood, and that when those choices are taken away, the will to live may also vanish” (Favored Strangers 78) Yet I believe that Stein issues a more specific warning in “The Gentle Lena.” The reed of same-sex passion vibrates throughout Three Lives to produce an indisputable triad of lesbitude, even though only echoes can be heard in the “life” of Lena, whose personality has been crushed flat. Lena is not, as Bridgman claims, “a simple creature who desires only the kindness of others”; she has simply been forced to the narrowest limits of lesbian experience, and reduced to the one-dimensional, for the sake of her survival (295). While there is only circumstantial proof that Lena’s inability to experience her same-sexuality caused the fragility of her ego, the fact that her homoerotic “gentle stir” coincides with her personality’s greatest definition, as well as with her greatest happiness, cannot be denied. In addition to the structural and direct indications of Lena’s same-sexual orientation, Stein offers a numinous peculiarity reminiscent of the undefined strangeness of Three Lives’ first reviews: “As these humble human lives are groping in bewilderment 255 so does the story telling itself” (Kansas City Star 5). We see this subtle track of the apparition herself in both beginnings of the “The Gentle Lena.” In the first bodily description of Lena, something indefinable is contained within her physicality: That rarer feeling that there was with Lena, showed in all the even quiet of her body movements, but in all it was the strongest in the patient, old-world ignorance, and earth made pureness of her brown, flat, soft featured face. (150) What does Stein reference here? Lena’s quietude, patience, and “earth-made pureness” are not unusual; if anything, they spell out the phenotype of an idealized servant, and answer to the class stereotypes that make farmgirls and servants “of the earth.” The “rarer feeling” is somehow associated with Lena’s body but becomes evident through characteristics that are not in themselves rare. Rather, the “rare feeling” somehow imbues these characteristics. This rareness is clarified in the chronological beginning of “The Gentle Lena,” when Aunt Haydon evaluates Lena’s suitability for emigration. In addition to approving Lena’s appropriate age and docility, Haydon “could feel the rarer strain there was in Lena”—something she feels because Haydon “with all her hardness had wisdom” (153). As we saw in “Melanctha,” wisdom has sexual connotations in Three Lives, here associated with Lena’s “rarer strain.” Haydon is correct that Lena’s unhappiness and unfitness within her family home—an unhappiness and unfitness associated with a sexualized “rare feeling” that Lena somehow embodies—suits Lena for emigration. This sexualized, non-normative embodiment—this indescribable “rare feeling” which cannot be directly referenced—is Lena’s unnameable, and almost imperceptible, lesbian orientation. 256 Homosexual Herman and Death by Marriage As Stein cannot directly express Lena’s homosexuality without breaking the naturalistic portrayal of a character whose sexuality is almost completely shut down, she expresses it in the most logical (and logically perverse) place: Lena’s husband. Herman—following the then-current model of inversion, not “her” man at all, but a “her man”—and his definitive taste for male company is a commonplace of “Lena” criticism, as is, to a lesser extent, his dramatization of Lena’s repressed sexuality. Herman is usually not, however, seen as the mirror image of Lena’s own homosexual desires. Herman is subordinate to his parents and works for them without wages: “Herman was now twenty-seven years old, but he had never stopped being scolded and directed by his father and his mother” (157). Nonetheless, he protests their decision that he should marry Lena. Like the bride herself, “Herman Kreder did not care much to get married….he was obedient to his mother, but he did not care much to get married” (157). Unlike the bride herself, Herman is active rather than passive in both his desire for same- sex companionship and in his protest against heterosexual marriage. Like Lena, Herman prefers same-sex company and “often went out on Saturday nights and on Sundays, with other men” (157). Stein clarifies that Herman’s preference for male company moves beyond normative homosociality by stating that Herman does not enjoy the hoary tradition of using women as a sexual outlet to embody a group of men’s homoerotics: “He liked to be with men and he hated to have women with them” (157). Herman is not a misogynist, for he is fond of his sister, and goes to her in his 257 greatest time of trouble. Nonetheless, outside his family, Herman’s orientation is definite: he wants to be with men alone. And as Stein refrains and refrains, Herman really does not want to marry. Unlike Lena, who is ignorant of the sexual components of marital life, Herman “knew more what it meant to be married and he did not like very well. He did not like to see girls and he did not want to have to have one always near him” (159). As Stein beats the reader about the head with Anna’s romance with Lehntman, so she makes as clear as she can without a censorable statement that Herman wants no intimate relations with women: He liked to go out with other men, but he never wanted that there should be any women with them. The men all teased him about getting married. Herman did not mind the teasing but he did not like very well the getting married and having a girl always with him (159). Herman’s discomfort-unto-disgust motivates him to the most dramatic action of his life and the “life” when he bolts before his and Lena’s wedding. 41 Herman runs off to his sister, who is to him as the cook is to Lena, a sympathetic ear who nonetheless insists that Herman fulfill his hegemonic function: “Herman’s married sister liked her brother Herman, and she did not want him to not like to be with other women….He was good, her brother Herman, and it would surely do him good to get married” (165). Sister reveals the stakes of compulsory heterosexuality—how Herman’s failure to marry lessens his masculinity, and thus his value: I’d be awful ashamed Herman, to really have a brother who didn’t have spirit enough to get married, when a girl is just dying for you to have him. You always like me to be with you Herman. I don’t see why you say you don’t want a girl to be all the time around you….Don’t act as if you weren’t a nice strong man, Herman. (166) 258 Though Herman does marry Lena, he never fulfills the hegemonic description of a “nice, strong man,” for the strength he develops is coded feminine through its centering on his children: “It was a new feeling Herman now had inside him, that made him feel he was strong for a struggle. It was new for Herman Kreder really to be wanting something, but Herman wanted strongly now to be a father” (172). Herman’s parental love for his children is the strongest emotion in “The Gentle Lena”: [Herman was] always very good to his children. He always had a very gentle, tender way when he held them. He spent all the time he was not working, with them. By and by he began to work all day in his own home so that he could have his children always in the same room with him. (174). Eventually, Herman entirely supervises the children’s eating, washing, dressing, and bedtime, and fully embraces the conventionally feminine roles of housewife and mother. Herman profits considerably from his marriage to Lena, which allows him to escape a subordination to his parents so strong that it also could be read as feminine. In essence, he trades up from the role of working daughter to the role of working wife. Furthermore, once Lena is dead, Herman is safe from active heterosexuality: “He never had a woman any more to be all the time around him” (174). He, like Anna, has made an arrangement with the heterosexual hegemony that allows him a secure, respected place in society and a fulfilling emotional outlet. Whether Herman engages in overtly homosexual activity is unclear, though Herman’s active pursuit of male company leaves the option open. Through Herman and Lena, Stein reflects a historical difference between male and female homosexuality in American culture. While lesbians were apparitional, so erased by culture that they often had no name for or self-consciousness of their sexuality, 259 male homosexuals were hypervisible and made hyperconscious of their sexual orientation. This is a logical result of masculine hegemony, for when male homosexuality is equated with effeminacy, a gay man, from a hegemonic perspective, repudiates his birthright and chooses to embrace an inferior status, which profoundly destabilizes the status quo and must be punished. Conversely, a woman who aspires to masculine status honors the values of the status quo, and unless she somehow attains masculine status or otherwise threatens the established order of things, is more charming than offensive. Unfortunately in this case, Lena is not a tomboy, and her same-sexuality is not coupled with masculinity. She therefore cannot “trade” roles with Herman and profit as he does from their arrangement. Nonetheless, her husband is supportive, undemanding, and presumably interested in heterosexual sex solely for reproductive purposes. Why then does the second part of Aunt Haydon’s plan destroy her? After all, part one of the aunt’s plot is a success. As an uneducated, unskilled, unambitious immigrant woman without conventional good looks, Lena’s greatest opportunity for a (somewhat) free existence is as a servant in a good home in a city. The considerable work pales next to what she did on the farm as a child, and where the urban environment and the regular (if slight) time off combine to give her a much greater freedom than she would have living on her family’s hardscrabble farm. Why doesn’t Lena’s life continue to improve when she gets married and considerably improves her material position? Her “life” offers ample evidence that Lena experiences both marital sex and pregnancy as violations, and that being a wife and a mother proves to be toxic. But why should they be any harder to bear 260 than her work as a servant? As Herman is willing to take on Lena’s “women’s work” as well as his own, why doesn’t Lena take advantage of her free time and, say, start hanging out in the proto-lesbian bars of fin-de-siècle Baltimore? There certainly were women who did so. For an example of late nineteenth- century lesbian life in the American South, consider the 1892 trial of nineteen-year-old “tomboy” Alice Mitchell, the daughter of a prominent Tennessee family who slit the throat of her lover with a razor on a Memphis street as she declared “I have killed her because I love her!” 42 The lovers had planned to elope but were separated when discovered by their families. Wherever and whenever a lesbian slits her lover’s throat and thus forces her sexuality to become actual rather apparitional in the public eye, there are many more who do not take such drastic action and go unseen. The facts of Lena’s marriage reveal the answers to Lena’s inability to make the best of it. Lena’s initial disinterest—“Lena did not care much to get married” (157), and “did not think much about what it meant for her to be married” (158)—is startling to those great enforcers of hierarchy, Haydon and the cook: “Mrs. Haydon could not believe that any girl, not even Lena, really had no feeling about getting married” (157). This is probably the clearest sign to her peers of Lena’s “peculiarity.” When Lena’s fiancée runs off three days before the wedding, Lena isn’t upset by her loss per se; her tears come exclusively from her aunt’s disappointment, and from Lena’s sense that she did something improper: “Lena did not know what is was that she had done, only she was not going to be married and it was a disgrace for a girl to be left by a man on the very day she was married” (160). After the marriage, Lena fades away, as if her lifeblood is sapped 261 then poisoned by active heterosexuality. Lena begins her decline under the unleavened anxiety and discomfort of her pregnancy and of living with her mother-in-law, who is as intrusive as the cook and Haydon, but whose scolding shades into abuse and is not tempered by the cook’s desire for Lena to thrive, so long as she is a “good girl.” Lena never recovers either the happiness or the personality definition (however slight) she had as a servant, and as she progressively disintegrates, the narrative gets faster and faster, as if there’s less of her to tell. The cook cannot understand Lena’s slow but absolute withdrawal, born of dumb despair—dumb as in unspoken, and dumb as in not understood. After all, by hegemonic standards, Lena should flourish. She’s pregnant, financially secure, and has a good husband: “Herman was always good and kind, and always helped her with her working. He did everything he knew to help her. He always did all the active new things in the house and for the baby” (173). In comparison with most women in Three Lives— especially the younger servants in “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena” that are her analogues—Lena “has it all.” The cook is so frustrated by Lena’s continued decline in the face of such fortune that she gives Lena the longest scolding of the book. This is how it begins: I know you going to have a baby Lena, but that’s no way for you to be looking. I am ashamed to most to see you come and sit here in my kitchen, looking so sloppy and like you never used to Lena. Herman is very good to you, you always say so, and he don’t treat you bad even though you don’t deserve to have anybody good to you, you so careless all the time, Lena, letting yourself go like you never had anybody tell you what was the right way you should know how to be looking… (170) 262 This cook’s litany of Lena’s sloppiness, untidiness, carelessness, ugliness, stupidity, and foolishness lasts for thirty-nine lines of invective, more than a page in most editions. The epic length of this invective instructs us just how “bad” Lena’s unhappiness is, and by hegemonic standards, how illegible. Despite this screed, the cook has an inkling of Lena’s despair when she tells her mistress “that’s the way it is with the girls when they want so to get married. They don’t know when they got it good” (171). The cook presumably—and Anna, her analogue, certainly—chose a life of service, with its relative economic independence, safety from male interference and sexuality, and freedom from childbearing, over the higher-ranked status of marriage. Such choice demands a self-possession that Lena lacks, and that even her ally the cook can neither give her nor advocate, as seen in her support of the engagement, and in her later misremembering of Lena’s wanting “so to get married.” Though the cook—and Anna—managed to avoid an active strain of compulsory heterosexuality for themselves, they can neither understand what they’re doing as such nor recommend it to others. Still, Lena couldn’t do better for a husband than Herman, who soon “liked Lena very well. He did not care very much about her but she never was a bother to him being there around him,” exhibiting the type of friendly, distant disinterest that might be amenable to a woman truly disinterested in a heterosexual attachment (171). Kreder even attempts to defend Lena from his mother, an unprecedented self-assertion. He proves to be not only a committed, engaged parent but also eventually become the primary caretaker for the children, though he never does develop any deep feeling for Lena. 263 Nonetheless, Lena never displays any affection, much less strong emotion or passion, for either her husband or her children; she is limited to duty, endurance, and the dread of her first pregnancy in particular, when “she could only sit still and be scared, and dull, and lifeless, and sure every minute she would die” (172). Once the baby comes, She was just the same….just dragged around and was careless with her clothes and all lifeless, and she acted always and lived on just as if she had no feeling. She always did everything regular with the work, the way she always had to do it, but she never got back any spirit within her.…she always just kept going now with her working, and she was always careless, and dirty, and a little dazed, and lifeless. (172-3) The cook continues to scold her “for going around so careless when she had not no trouble, and sitting there so dull, and always being so thankless”—but Lena, uncharacteristically, is not easily penetrated—“mainly Lena did not seem to hear much…mostly Lena just lived along and was careless in her clothes, and dull and lifeless” (173). As she eventually escapes her difficult mother-in-law, and as both her husband and children grow to expect nothing from her, why does Lena continue to disintegrate? The only reasons left are (1) the role of wife and mother itself, and (2) Lena’s lack of same-sex contact apart from maternal figures such as the cook and Mrs. Kreder. As we have seen, Lena’s iffy consciousness is strongest in a homosocial, homoerotic, homosexual context. Her marriage is therefore a mortal blow. Lena finally retreats so far from worldly engagement that she disappears. She “grew more and more lifeless and [Kreder] now never thought about her. He more and more took care of all their three children” (174). Kreder is happier with her gone, and the “life” ends with him “very happy, very genteel, very quiet, and well content alone with his three [children]” (174). Lena’s departure from the world corresponds with her 264 husband’s more fervent embrace of it; he now may fulfill his desire to live without female companionship. Herman’s sexual inversion—his dislike for heterosexual coupling and his embrace of female-gendered traits—refracts Lena’s own sexuality, which Stein must refract in other characters, as Lena herself is too fragmented for her sexual urges to muster more than “a gentle stir” (150). In conclusion, Lena is a proto- lesbian who comes closest to having an ego in the context of same-sex desire, and whose lack of any outlet for her same-sex orientation destroys her in a clear-cut case of death by marriage and children. Three Lesbian Lives Q.E.D. is a novel in three parts—“Adele,” “Mabel Neathe,” and “Helen”—named after its three women characters. Is Three Lives also a novel, one that takes the form farther by making the connection between the parts entirely thematic? Stein supposedly replied: “I hate labels. It’s just a book, a book about different characters, three different people I knew long ago” (qtd. in Sterne 49). Whether Three Lives is a novel, a collection of short stories, or a mixed bag of a novella and two stories, it is certainly a book unified by time, place, and theme that offers a naturalist portrait of the three probable fates for a working-class Southern woman with a same-sexual orientation. With “The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and “The Gentle Lena,” Stein offers a unified treatise of three case studies. Stein’s treatise serves as a corrective to the apparitional lesbian and exposes three sorry alternatives for a working-class proto-lesbian in a homophobic society where female same-sexuality doesn’t publicly “exist.” 265 The proto-lesbian may struggle to consciously realize and embody her sexuality at the cost of constant and considerable unhappiness and instability, like Melanctha; she may repress her sexuality to secure her hegemonic place, like Anna; or she may fail either to express or repress her sexuality at the cost of ego incoherence and a consciousness so slight that it barely exists, like Lena. The status of “Melanctha” as the central and longest “life” accords with its heroine’s comparative success at self-realization, but this near- realization of a lesbian self requires the cloaking of homosexuality in heterosexuality in the text itself, an invisibility cloak that is nonetheless detectable by the imperfect fit of many aspects of the “life” with Melanctha’s heterosexuality, such as Jeff and Melanctha’s relationship, which is in several respects is easier to read as a cloaked lesbian relationship than a more straightforward mimesis of heterosexual love. “Melanctha” is flanked by “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena,” and this bookending by parallel “lives” suggests that Stein not only wished Three Lives to be read as a unit but also that she wished to contrast Anna’s and Lena’s slighter achievements at realizing their same-sex orientations with Melanctha’s valiant struggle. “The Good Anna” and “The Gentle Lena” are paralleled by (1) their brevity in comparison to “Melanctha”; (2) their heroines’ similar status as German immigrant servants; (3) their heroines’ virtual presence in each other’s lives (the unnamed cook as an analogue for Anna in the “The Gentle Lena,” and several of Anna’s underservants as an analogue for Lena in “The Good Anna); (4) the identical morphology of their titles (demonstrative article + a positive, “feminine” attribute as adjective + a two-syllable German name ending in “a”) vs. the unmodified, exotic “Melanctha,” the only “life” with a subtitle, 266 “Each One As She May”; and (5) a number of shared small details, such as the presence of a character named “Mathilda” in both lives, which ties them together at the same time as the very different characters of Anna’s favorite employer, Miss Mathilda, and Lena’s meanest cousin, Mathilda Haydon, warn against a simple parallel. 43 Still, such twinning clarifies how Anna and Lena offer two sides of the same failure to achieve a conscious and embodied lesbian psychosexual construction. Though all three “lives” end in pain, misery, and death, Stein does offer the possibility for a happy ending for a proto-lesbian in the blithe fate of Miss Mathilda of “The Good Anna.” Miss Mathilda is a single, financially-independent woman who would rather buy avant-garde art than dress “appropriately,” and who is surrounded by a close circle of friends but never shows the slightest interest in a heterosexual attachment. In Mathilda’s move from Bridgepoint to Europe, Stein forecasts her own escape from Baltimore’s constraints and offers the possibility of a happy lesbian ending like her own—at least for a woman who can afford it. Stein thus anticipates and augments Virginia Woolf’s assertion in A Room of One’s Own (1929) that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (4). The three fates of the three “Lives”—fragmentation, repression, or an unsuccessful search for expression and self- realization—are presented as the only possible alternatives for a protolesbian without “money and a room of her own.” In Three Lives, Stein states that a sexually dissident woman not only needs money and privacy to write but also to be. 267 Endnotes for Chapter 4 1 Stein’s differentiation between proto-lesbians with and without money may be a product of Stein’s own placement on the monied side of the line. Scholarship such as Chauncey’s Gay New York has conclusively proven that throughout the 20 th century, the poor in some ways had greater opportunities for same-sexual expression than the middle classes, due to a lower level of cultural surveillance. Stein may thereby be projecting her own experience of the “respectable” (as opposed to the “artistic”) upper middle class upon the servant class that held Anna and Lena, though not Melanctha. That said, certainly Stein, Toklas, and the other women in their circle experienced a direct relation between financial independence and their freedom of same-sexual expression. 2 Melanctha may be the most psychosexually evolved of the heroines of Three Lives, but she is also a racist creation. Stein and “Melanctha” are products of their time and culture, and many scholars have focused upon and strongly objected to their racism. (For a particularly strong example, cf. Saldívar-Hull.) Stein and “Melanctha” are equally undeniably remarkably progressive for their time in terms of race. As discussed in Chapter 3, literary theorists have focused keenly on how Melanctha’s sexual investigations are intertwined with her status as an African-American. Unfortunately, considerations of Melanctha as a racist character whose hypersexuality is intertwined with her race, as well as discussions of Melanctha as a character whose race is a “code” for her homosexuality, tend to elide the homosexuality of both Stein and Melanctha. Specifically, critics ignore Stein’s direct representation of Melanctha’s lesbian sex and love, remove “Melanctha” from the context of the rest of Three Lives, and forget the historical context within which Stein wrote, as well as the support for “Melanctha” within the African-American community, including testimonials by Nella Larsen and, especially, Richard Wright. I consider the racist and racial aspects of “Melanctha” in Chapter 3, and later in Chapter 4. 3 For instance, this criticism could be applied to one of the canonical readings of queer theory: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of Henry James’s The Beast in the Jungle (1903), first published in 1983, and then again in 1991, in Epistemology of the Closet. Kosofsky cannot offer any direct evidence that the unnamed fate that waits for John Marcher like a “beast in the jungle” is homosexuality, in part because James is writing about the unnameability of this “fate” by Marcher to the point-of-view character, May Bartram, and about the imperceptibility of this “beast” by Bartram, until a man at Marcher’s funeral gives Bartram, Sedgwick, and through Sedgwick’s argument, the reader a clue of how to understand them. Though Sedgwick’s reading is now widely accepted, the textual clues that she used to make them were sufficiently subtle to keep her reading unread, or at least unpublished, for more than a hundred years. Without this subtlety, it’s highly doubtful that the text could have achieved wide dissemination and influence. 268 4 For the material constraints on the publication of Three Lives and the non-publication of Q. E. D. and Fernhurst, see Chapters 3 and 5. 5 Cf. Chapter 3, n. 3. 6 The Dreyfus affair and its relation to Stein are discussed in Chapter 5. 7 Wagner-Martin expands upon Stein’s fear as follows: “It was dangerous enough to be a woman [at Harvard], but to have that danger compounded by racial or religious difference was certain hardship…But perhaps the most dangerous difference at the turn of the century was sexual. Here the aura of misinformation about sexual preference, or about any sexuality at all, meant that life could be ruined by the private being made public” (“Questions” 260). 8 Bookstaver, who would later marry, kept up a friendship with Stein and later acted as her literary agent for Three Lives. Bookstaver, who in the midst of the affair had read Stein’s letters aloud as a party joke, presumably enjoyed the publication of the affair, at least in a cloaked form. 9 For misogyny at medical school, cf. Hopkins-Wagner: “Many professors were sexist, as were textbooks and jokes: women students recorded being hit by ‘missiles of paper, tinfoil, [and] tobacco quids” (44). In terms of anti-semitism, it’s not that Baltimore and Hopkins were particularly inhospitable, but that Harvard was unusually hospitable. The university and opened the country’s first Jewish museum in 1889, and would proceed to hire the country’s first professor of Judaica in 1925. 10 Cf. Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of “Genius,” Chapter 1, for a thorough discussion of these articles, and the place of Stein and Solomons’s work within the context of James’s larger project. 11 For assessments of the link between Flaubert and Stein, see Brinnin 56-64, Hobhouse 70-73, and Walker 19-21. 12 For instance, Bridgman finds Flaubert “of minimal significance” to Stein (47). More recently, Karin Cope states that “although superficially and thematically, the first of these stories bore some relation [to Flaubert]…Stein’s work was anything but a translation, nor did she follow Flaubert’s style and content” (98). 13 The original French is as follows: Ainsi, au milieu de Toucques, comme on passait sous des fenêtres entourées de capucines, il dit, avec un haussement d'épaules:—«En voilà une Mme Lehoussais, qui au lieu de prendre un jeune homme...» Félicité n'entendit pas le reste; les 269 chevaux trottaient, l'âne galopait; tous enfilèrent un sentier, une barrière tourna, deux garçons parurent, et l'on descendit devant le purin, sur le seuil même de la porte. 14 Anna’s same-sexuality is so blatant that critics have had to take some note, though that note tends to be brief. One of the best readings of ‘The Good Anna” in lesbian terms is a brief note by Linda Wagner-Martin, who writes that “the reader knew Anna through…her lesbian love for Mrs. Lehntman, her ‘only romance’….Anna [becomes] complex, partly through the emphasis on her love for women, Her aim in life was—supposedly—to serve, but the text showed that Anna was only happy when she controlled the people she worked for. Dedicated to wiping out the sensual pleasure in life, Anna exhausted herself into an early death” (236). This is from Wagner-Martin’s biography of the Stein family, and in that context, it’s unfair to criticize her for neglecting to note that Anna almost certainly does not engage in physical same-sexuality, or for failing to link Anna’s need to control others with her need to control herself. In fact, it’s likely that Wagner-Martin’s status as a biographer allows her to make such statements when so many other Stein writers have not. 15 By “love object,” I mean the combination of the external and internal object that characterizes romantic love. In psychoanalytic terms, objects are not people, though they are embodied in people. Internal objects predate the lover and are shaped by infantile and childhood experience. When people fall in love, they project a positive internal object onto a person (or something else), who becomes the face of the object. For Anna, Mrs. Drehten wears that face. For Melanctha, Jane, Jeff, Jem, and Rose wear that face. For Lena, no one wears that face; the three other servant girls come closest. 16 For instance, Jayne L. Walker in The Making of a Modernist: Gertrude Stein from Three Lives to Tender Buttons offers an extended brief on the connection between the Contes and the Lives but never touches on a lesbian application (19-21). 17 Cope hears an echo of May Bookstaver in both Lehntman’s appeal to other women and in her political work (108). 18 Stein often does not capitalize adjectives of race, ethnicity, and religion in Three Lives. 19 Here, Anna echoes the governess of The Turn of the Screw (1898), who is convinced that her charge Miles could not be have properly expelled for bad behavior, and who is hesitant to name the sexual nature of such badness: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the boy’s conduct at school….He had made the whole charge absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the real rose-flush of his innocence; he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid unclean school world, and he had paid a price for it (168). 270 That said, Anna does consciously acknowledge her dog’s sexuality, while the governess does not consciously acknowledge her charge’s. 20 Critics vary on who was the primary recipient of the “Baby” nametag. For our purposes, the fact suffices that both women called each other “Baby” both in person and in the love poetry posthumously published in collections such as in Bee Time Vine (1953) and Baby Precious Always Shines (1999). 21 Is there an aspect of racialized sexual expression here in Stein’s use of black? Certainly the only heroine of Three Lives who actually has sex is the mixed-race Melanctha. Yet the most sexually promiscuous character in “Melanctha” is Jane Harden, a black girl who can pass for white. In addition, Lehntman’s illegitimate mothers are almost exclusively white. Note that Jane Harden, Melanctha’s same-sex lover, is consistently described as roughened, which accords with Ferderner’s roughen-ing of Anna and Lehntman’s relationship. 22 Cf. Barbara Will’s “Gertrude Stein and Zionism” for the most extended treatment of this thesis. 23 The first draft of The Making of Americans was written before Q. E. D., in 1902. The novel proper was written from 1906-8 and published in 1925. In early drafts, the novel’s family was Jewish, but this overt ethnicity was revised away, though Jewish concerns and themes still pervade the novel, especially in its first half. 24 Anti-Semitism in both Europe and the United States in discussed in terms of Stein’s public persona in Chapter 5. 25 The classic explication of how a childhood beating can be inextricable from sexuality is Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten,” and the desire to connect Freud’s essay to Melanctha’s sexualized childhood beating is tempting. Nonetheless, the graft doesn’t easily take. Freud’s fantasy has three parts. The very young child fantasizes that a rival for parental affection is being beaten. The fantasy is then transformed by Oedipal love into a fantasy where the child himself is beaten. This punishment does double duty as a displaced expression of desire and as a punishment for an inappropriate desire, a doubling that packs quite a wallop. For adults, the fantasy is anonymous: “A child is being beaten.” The adult feels a sexual charge but doesn’t know its origin, and Freud notes that the self has no fixed position for the self within the fantasy. He is a sadist and a masochist, a voyeur and a participant, and persecuted appropriately or inappropriately. While this market economy of the transformations of desire is extraordinarily relevant to all of Three Lives, the only part of the essay that easily applies to “Melanctha” is young Melanctha’s pleasure in the beating. Note however that Freud makes no allowance for the beating as a mechanism for self-knowledge and self-empowerment; he is almost 271 entirely concerned with it as a fantasy. If we see Melanctha’s beating as Stein’s fantasy, however, Freud’s reading works well. One can easily imagine the very young Gertrude wishing that her brother Leo would be beaten, then wishing that she herself would be beaten, and finally as an adult receiving an erotic charge from writing the scene. 26 Ruddick reads this binary as an illustration of and confrontation with Stein’s teacher William James’s psychological theories. See “Melanctha and the Psychology of William James” (1982-83), later incorporated in Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis (1990). 27 Some of the usual tensions of this argument is missing, as Jeff never argues that he’s bisexual, broadly queer, experimenting, or irreducible to labels—all valid claims in the actual world. The lack of these details may stem from the fact that neither Stein nor Adele indicate or pretend to have an erotic interest that isn’t homosexual. 28 I simplify here. For instance, certain socially prominent Southern African-American families did not value pale skin, as it carried a taint of illegitimacy, and therefore offended these families’ deep adherence to hegemonic values. In other words, while Melanctha’s paleness might be desirable, it would not outweigh being of poor “stock.” Nonetheless, my overall point about the value of light skin in the African-American community providing a sound social basis for the marriage of a paler-skinned woman to a darker man of a higher social class applies in general. 29 Again, I am simplifying. (See previous note.) For a well-established, socially prominent Southern black family, a stormy relationship with an inappropriate mistress might well be de trop. Jeff, however, is the son of a butler, “very steady, very intelligent, and very dignified” whose own father had also worked for the Campbell family as a free man (70). (This common surname implies that Jeff’s great-grandparents had been slaves of the white Campbells.) Jeff comes from conservative, religious parents who were “regularly married,” and who helped pay for his medical education—and the ruin of the hopes of such hardworking parents through their son’s corruption via an inappropriate mistress is a literary staple, especially among French realist and naturalist writers such as Zola and Balzac. Yet Jeff not only “escapes” Melanctha but also creates the type of life he always states that he wants, “working for himself and for all the colored people” (129). Jeff’s happy ending is yet another of Stein’s refutations of standard literary tropes. 30 Critics have associated Melanctha with melanin, which had been discovered and named as a pigment when Stein wrote Three Lives, as Stein almost certainly knew, due to her scientific education. This association equates the name “Melanctha” with “black female,” which seems unlikely for four reasons: (1) Melanctha is described as a “graceful, pale yellow” in a “life” that is consistently precise in terms of skin color (54); (2) even in scientific circles, melanin was not yet commonly understood as a primary component of human skin color (for example, after considerable searching I have found melanin only in the following entries of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica: “feather,” 272 “haemosporidia,” “malaria,” “albino,” “tumour,” “pathology,” and “cephalopoda”); (3) the heroine is not named Melanina, a better etymological fit for “black girl,” but Melanctha, which is considerably closer to melancholy than melanin; and most importantly, (4) Melanctha is a nonce name, and Stein for all her stylistic experimentation did not favor odd names, which strongly implies an allegorical intention, which for the reasons above is more likely to be “melancholy girl” than “melanin girl.” All that said, both meanings may be intended. Brenda Wineapple holds that Stein derived “Melanctha” from “Melancthon,” the sixteenth-century German humanist whose original name was “Schwartzherd,” or “black earth” (235). While this may be the literal origin of the name, it seem much more likely that Stein chose it for its connotation, rather than its denotation. For a concise introduction to Melancthon, see Cope 314, n. 89. 31 The similarity of the works probably required Larsen to attach her compliments on “Melanctha” when she sent Stein a copy of Quicksand. See Chapter 3. 32 Klein and Winnicott’s theorization of the relationship between the internal and external object is relevant here. The baby internalizes positive and negative experiences of the world—say, hunger and satisfaction—into good and bad objects, what Melanie Klein calls that good breast and the bad breast. The baby then projects both these objects onto the mother, who holds the objects. The mother’s treatment of the baby—her holding of the objects—is then internalized, and the internal object is changed by this introjection. Through the repetitive process of repeated projection onto introjection from the mother, the baby’s internal object grows more and more defined. This is the internal object that determines who Melanctha picks as her external object, and that she projects upon the external object. External objects “fit” internal object more or less well, and their introjection can further shape the internal object. 33 Freud most fully develops “the return of the repressed” in “Repression” (1915). 34 Rose may be Rose may be Rose, but Stein’s famous quote “[A] Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” dates not from Three Lives but from her 1913 composition of the poem “Sacred Emily,” first published in Geography and Plays (1922). That said, Stein’s statement of the unchanging nature and appeal of a rose, and the insufficiency of its representation in comparison to that nature and that appeal, probably predated 1913. It certainly postdated 1913, as seen in its inclusion in Stein’s Opera and Plays, The World is Round, Alphabets and Birthdays, Stanzas in Meditation, Lectures in America, Bee Time Vine, and its use by Toklas as a promotional tool for her partner’s work, and as a moneymaking tool in its own right. Lifting Belly (1989), first published as part of Bee Time Vine, offers the rose as a metaphor for the unchanging nature and appeal of female genitalia: “Why can lifting belly please me/Lifting belly can please me because it is an occupation I enjoy./Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” (39). 273 Stein’s affection for the name “Rose” can be seen in its use not only in her poetry but also in its use in Fernhurst. 35 Cf. Corbett, De Lauretis, Isay. 36 The plethora of Mabels in Stein’s life and art can be confusing. May Bookstaver’s original lover was Mabel Haynes, who was also a friend of Stein’s. Mabel Haynes is represented in Q. E. D. by the character Mabel Neathe. Stein also maintained intense if irregular friendships with the wealthy art patron Mabel Dodge, who was important to Stein’s career, and Mabel Weeks, who was a good friend to both Stein and her brother, Leo. Dodge and Weeks are both mentioned in Chapter 5. 37 Fernhurst is also yet another iteration of the Gertrude Stein/May Bookstaver affair, within which Stein becomes Redfern’s clueless, plodding wife, Bookstaver becomes Bruce, and Bookstaver’s original lover Mabel Weeks becomes Dean Thomas. This formulation allows Stein to separate out her culpability in the Bookstaver affair (after all, she did know that Bookstaver was in a long-established relationship) and merely suffer as the blameless Mrs. Redfern—a separation that begs the question of who Redfern is. He may be the “male,” seductive, selfish part of Stein who attempts to break Bookstaver from her original lover—a part of Stein that she has not yet incorporated into her self- image. By this armchair analysis, both Redferns together equal Stein. 38 Cf. Stimpson’s “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein.” 39 “Compulsory heterosexuality” was first theorized—at least under that name—by Adrienne Rich in "Compulsory heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (1980), which considers heterosexuality a violent political institution that demands the "male right of physical, economical, and emotional access” to women. Heterosexuality is made compulsive as society prevents women from realizing a sexual and emotional preference to other women. As initially conceived by Rich, compulsory heterosexuality prevented an appreciation of the “lesbian continuum,” which included a range of woman-identified and woman-centered intimacy and commitment that only became sexual at one end of the range. Though this was intended by Rich as a repudiation of the cultural stigmatization of lesbianism as deviant, it had the unfortunate result of suggesting that sexual intimacy was not integral to female homosexuality. This coincides with the limited view of sexuality revealed in the essay’s first sentence: “Biologically men have only one innate orientation—a sexual one that draws them to women—while women have two innate orientations, sexual toward men and reproductive toward their young”—a statement which itself is deformed by compulsory heterosexuality. Though Rich has attempted to modify and contextualize such statements in the decades since she first published “Compulsory heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," they are still, in my view, inherent to her theoretical apparatus, which is in many ways contrary to core tenets of this dissertation. 274 Nonetheless, Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality” suits Lena perfectly, though it is inadequate to explain her husband Herman, who as we shall see repudiates Rich’s thesis in a number of ways. “Compulsory heterosexuality” also falters in the face of the rest of Three Lives, as it does not allow a precise analysis of, say, why Anna, who certainly lives a woman-centered life, is nonetheless horribly deformed by social constraints. So I use the term with a heavy dose of salt. 40 Larsen and Quicksand are briefly discussed in Chapter 3, pages 109–110. 41 DeKoven’s note in the Norton edition of Three Lives exemplifies the overly-cautious readings of homosexual Herman that underplay Stein’s naturalist intervention in the still- active tradition of denying the reality of gay and lesbian lives. DeKoven implies a choice of published representations for homosexuality when censorship made no such choice possible: “Note that Herman prefers to be with men, just as Lena prefers to be with women: Stein suggest homosociality at least, and probably also homoeroticism” (157, n. 8). Such shallow readings are the slightest possible acknowledgement of homosexuality commensurate with good scholarship. 42 For an extended treatment of the Mitchell case, cf. Duggan. 43 There are also a few parallels of this type between “Melanctha” and the other “lives.” Consider the slant rhyme between [Jane] Hardin (in “Melanctha”) and [Mrs.] Haydon (in “The Gentle Lena”). 275 Chapter 5: Gertrude Stein, 1909-1933 From Broadly Queer to Specifically Lesbian An Impossible Success The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published in 1933, an unpromising year for the debut of a celebrated biography of a lesbian partnership: a year that saw the height of the worldwide Great Depression, the ascendance of the Nazis in Europe, and the consolidation (broadly speaking) of the restriction of personal freedom that followed the end of the 1920s. Nonetheless, the memoir quickly became not only an international bestseller but also a cultural phenomenon. Gertrude Stein, for years an embodiment of the avant-garde if not the lunatic fringe, now held the cover of Time magazine, and her memoir was a main selection of the Literary Guild, a popular book-of-the-month club that published editions of new books for middle-brow subscribers who trusted the Guild to provide them with trendy, respectable contemporary books with literary cachet. Surprisingly, this middle-class acceptability and mass-market fame was coeval with a blatant manifestation of lesbian erotics and love. Even more surprisingly, The Autobiography, as a testament to a lesbian relationship, is a pointed political statement against a culture that didn’t acknowledge such relations. The improbability of The Autobiography’s success is hard to appreciate from today’s perspective, dulled as we are with familiarity with Stein and The Autobiography and distant as we are from the cultural positioning of female homosexuality in the 1930s. Stein’s centrality to both the literary canon and lesbian identity further occlude the improbability of the memoir’s success. The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas quickly 276 became what it still is today—the only work of Gertrude Stein as well known to the mass public as Stein was herself. Though Stein’s fame had grown exponentially since her debut in the 1900s, her readership had remained small; she was much better known than read. Stein’s debut, Three Lives (1909), was published by a vanity press in an edition of 1,000, with a British reprint of an unknown but certainly small number in 1920. 1 The first thousand copies took eighteen years to sell out and were only reprinted in 1927, in a small edition of an unknown number by the boutique publisher Albert & Charles Boni, Inc. 2 Yet less than a year after the success of The Autobiography, Random House printed Three Lives in an edition of 5,000 under its Modern Library imprint, which gave the text a bivalent aura of respectability and cachet. Furthermore, the Modern Library ensconced its selections in a canon of Twentieth-Century American literature that Random House successfully promoted both as a public service and as a marketing tool that increased the value of its intellectual property. The first paperback edition, in 1958, had a print run of 10,000. The Autobiography itself was initially printed in an edition of 5,400 by Harcourt Brace & Company, the first of Stein’s publishers with name recognition among the middle class and enough money to invest substantially in advertising and publicity. The Autobiography also had appreciable sales for special editions printed by the Literary Guild and the Weekend Library. The first print run for a paperback of The Autobiography was for 15,000 copies, in 1955, and the first Penguin edition was of 20,000 books, in 1966. The Autobiography sells well to this day. 277 Though Stein’s celebrity was refreshed and increased by her memoir, she had been a public figure for two decades before its publication. Stein became a celebrity in conjunction with the media explosion around the 1913 Armory Show that introduced modern art to the United States and established Stein as a writer who adapted modernist techniques to prose. As we shall see, the striking visuality of Stein’s celebrity persona, coupled with her association with the European artists both personally and in terms of her own art, made her the perfect recipient for the scorn and fascination stirred up by the visual modernists en masse. After all, most of the artists in question were foreigners, and for the mass American public of 1913, offensiveness, bizarrerie, and incomprehensibility were part and parcel of being foreign—and these artists weren’t from England, where at least people spoke English. But the public expected better of a girl from Pennsylvania, even if she were an ill-dressed, overweight, expatriate, unmarried Jew. Unfortunately, Stein’s notoriety did not increase her profit. More often than not, Stein was forced to subsidize publication or fund it outright. After decades of frustration, Stein, in 1930, at the age of fifty-six, sold part of her art collection to found her own press—Plain Editions—with Toklas to publish Stein’s work. Nor did Stein’s fame increase her readership. For instance, Stein’s second major work, Tender Buttons (1914) received thirty-seven (mostly poor) notices upon publication, almost twice as much as her debut, even though Three Lives (1909) was fiction and Tender Buttons poetry, which historically receives considerably inferior press. Yet the 1000 copies of Tender Buttons sold slowly and poorly, wasn’t reprinted for decades, wasn’t published in paperback until 278 a pirate edition was printed in 1958, and despite Stein’s fame, never moved more units than Three Lives, which remained Stein’s best-selling work until her memoir. Stein’s other work did considerably worse. Her second volume, a stitched pamphlet of The Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia (1912), was produced in an edition of 300 and offered as gifts. Next came Tender Buttons (1914), and then the stapled Have They Attacked Mary, He Giggled (1917), which was issued in a tiny edition of 200 by Vanity Fair as amends for unintentionally dropping lines from the title poem when it was published in the magazine. Stein didn’t put out another volume until 1922, when she paid for the printing of her collection Geography and Plays by an obscure but respectable press—Four Seas, out of Boston—in her biggest edition yet —2,500 copies. Geography and Plays had an introduction by Sherwood Anderson, then a hot young author, and Stein hoped that the collection would make her as read as much as she was known. Nonetheless, Geography and Plays sold so poorly that it took eighteen years for all the printed sheets to be bound. Even today, those seeking Stein’s early work in collectible editions are faced with a plethora of Geography and Plays. Stein’s sales diminished even further with her magnum opus, The Making of Americans (1925), which no publisher would accept, despite the persistence of Stein and her friends. After Stein published The Making of Americans herself in an edition of 500, the novel wasn’t printed again in full for forty-one years. A Description of Literature (1926) came out in an edition of 200 copies, and there were similarly tiny editions of Composition as Explanation (1926), A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow (1926), A Village Are You Ready Yet Not Yet A Play in Four Acts (1928), Useful 279 Knowledge (1928), and Dix Portraits (1930). 3 The general public knew no more of these works then than they do now, but as this chapter will show, Stein’s fame remained constant, and constantly split from the success of her work. Stein’s solution to the divorce between her fame and her readership was to make her celebrity persona the subject of her text. That Stein created this solution is certain; that she intended to is not. Regardless, Stein’s fame motivated the public to buy her work, which for almost twenty years had been more read about than read. This new readership pushed her fame to new heights, which in turn inspired new readers to read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Even better, the apparent inexplicability of the memoir’s title immediately reminded people why they were interested in Stein: her outrageousness, which was indexed by but not limited to the modern artists who were major characters in the Autobiography. This strangeness was not, however, repeated on the textual level, as the Autobiography was written in a linear, straightforward style, and was not hard to read. Stein thus established a positive feedback loop that enhanced the popularity of her work as well as her persona. After twenty-two years of hard labor, a bestseller was born. And with that bestseller, Gertrude Stein became indisputably the foremost American lesbian writer of the twentieth century. Stein is the only lesbian writer before the Women’s Movement who (1) enjoyed mass-market success, (2) earned a canonic perch, (3) wrote works with gay and lesbian content and a queer aesthetic, and (4) was easily identifiable throughout her career as lesbian by those primed for such knowledge by their own sexual dissent. How did Stein achieve this singularity? Why was she 280 acceptable to the mass market at all, when she openly sported so many attributes that inspired hatred and fear? Stein was unmarried when marriage was expected; financially independent at a time when women properly depended; obviously Jewish at a time of marked anti-semitism; expatriate when abroad and its inhabitants were viewed as suspect; physically large and alarmingly uncorseted; androgynous and even masculine in a number of unseemly registers; visually striking in a way that strongly flouted hegemonic standards of female beauty; and by the time The Autobiography was published, apparently and unashamedly middle-aged. Stein’s impropriety extended far past her association with the visual modernists, which is why she remained a symbol of the outré artist long after the brouhaha around the Armory Show died down. Independently, these attributes might have brought about censure and censorship. For many artists and writers, they did. In this chapter, I show the process by which the sheer number of Stein’s broadly queer attributes overwhelmed the public, who chose to marvel instead of persecute. Stein’s plethora of queer attributes pointed an audience primed for such reception to see her as an embodiment of same-sexual erotics and identity. Yet the combination of the multiplicity of Stein’s broadly queer attributes, coupled with the longstanding invisibility of lesbianism in mass culture, coupled with Stein’s own indifference to traditional standards of value, coupled with Stein’s traditional association with the modernists who for decades signified for most Americans both the height of sophistication and the murk of the indecipherable and incomprehensible, coupled with the tradition of the outré artist in the role of a court jester, coupled with the respectability that comes to almost anyone 281 who remains in the public eye long enough, positioned Stein as a charming curiosity rather than a threat. The Autobiography therefore performed the same hat trick as Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and found both popularity and profit in both its author’s broad queerness and its author’s specific homosexuality—a homosexuality that both constantly replenished its author’s broad queerness and spoke specifically to those who could hear it. Stein’s agency within and control over the potency of her celebrity persona was incomplete—as it was for Capote. And the results of Stein’s potency were arguably harmful to her person and her art—as they were for Capote. Nonetheless, Stein’s public potency was fabulous in the primary registers of the word: extremely good, almost unbelievably so, and appropriate for myths and legends. This chapter assesses Stein’s fabulousness from 1909 to the mid-1930s. The history and analysis of Stein’s celebrity persona is provided with an eye to how Stein’s broad queerness and (eventual) respectability provided the context for The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas to become a critically acclaimed bestseller as well as a testament to lesbian partnership. I consider three originary moments in the history of Stein’s celebrity persona in the mass market, none of which have been closely examined: the birth of Stein’ celebrity persona proper in a puff piece in the February 13, 1910, New York Press; the first parody of Stein to appear in a mass-market magazine, published in the March 22, 1913 Saturday Evening Post; and the World War I poems by Stein in Life and Vanity Fair magazine that earned her respectability and her widest readership until the Autobiography. I also consider three aspects of Stein’s authorial persona that don’t have an “origin” per se but ripple through her persona: the phenomenon of Stein as a visual 282 spectacle, the appreciation of Stein’s work as objets d’art rather than literature, and the surprising misconception of Stein as a decadent, opium-addicted femme fatale prevalent both before and after the publication of The Autobiography. This history establishes both the tremendous strength and the specific delineations of Stein’s broadly queer authorial persona, which not only frames but also serves as the subject of Stein’s Autobiography. “A Zolaesque American”: Stein’s First Celebrity Profile Stein’s first appearances in the press—the initial, 1909–10 reviews of Three Lives—are limited to her “peculiar” book itself. In these reviews, the only mark of an authorial persona is the occasional quiet assumption that the author herself is “peculiar,” like her work. 4 This peculiarity also marks the birth of Stein’ celebrity persona proper, which dates from “A Zolaesque American” in the February 13, 1910, New York Press, a New York City daily (1896–1916) with an active interest in café society and a frequently knowing tone. The Press’s second section begins with a collection of short, occasional pieces, with a jokey feature about animal portraiture, “The Dumb Models of New York,” as the lead. Page five offers “Sketches from ‘Just a Wife’ at the Belasco” above the fold, and below it, a few cartoons and jokes, as well as “A Zolaesque American.” This placement indicates that Stein was considerably less newsworthy to the Press than pet owners who profit from their dogs’ modeling. Nonetheless, the article does prove that, even at this initial parturition from her work, Stein’s public persona was inextricable from the broadly queer. This conflation is made even more certain by the comparative unimportance of the item and the presumably off-hand manner that it was written, which 283 offer a more transparent window than a more studied portrait would on the cultural discourses that coagulated into Stein’s persona. The valences of Stein’s queerness are apparent from the article’s title. There is almost nothing about Zola or his or Stein’s writing in “A Zolaesque American,” which is a short profile of Stein as a Paris “character” and art collector. What then does this title mean? In 1910, the name “Zola” (and presumably the adjective “Zolaesque”) rang four chimes that reverberated with Stein: (1) a Jewish chime, (2) a Naturalist chime, (3) a French chime, and (4) an iconoclastic chime. Zola, of course, is the French Naturalist author whose 1898 J’accuse , an open letter on the front page of the first issue of the daily newspaper L’Aurore, charged his government with anti-semitism in the wrongful conviction of army captain Alfred Dreyfus for espionage (fig. 10). Zola was convicted for libel, dismissed from the Legion of Honor, and forced into exile to avoid jail. Fig. 10: L’Aurore, 13 January 1898 “The Dreyfus Affair” convulsed France, and Dreyfus and Zola were only fully exonerated in 1906, four years before “A Zolaesque American” appeared in the Press. Though Zola himself was not Jewish, and though Stein’s own identification as a Jew was 284 inconsistent, the article title’s notification of Stein’s Jewishness, though inexplicit, was fueled both by Zola’s Jewish-flavored recent fame and Stein’s own name, and thus at double-strength. 5 The question of what actually is a “Jewish surname” is complex, as some Jews don’t have them, as some who have them aren’t Jewish, and as the definition of “Jewish” itself shifts between religion, culture, and heredity. Public perception, however, especially when occluded by anti-semitism, has little patience for such niceties. Furthermore, the Jewishness of many surnames does have a definite origin, rooted in law. Ashkenazic Jews (the European Jews who composed a large majority of Jewish immigrants to the United States) traditionally had a patronym instead of a surname after their proper name. Stein’s name in this circumstance would have been Gertrude Bat- Daniel, Daniel being her father’s name. Surnames were forced upon Jews in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century—by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1787, and by Napoleon in 1808. Most of Europe followed. In some cases, governments created lists of acceptable surnames, which were either Biblical or made up; in others, Jews picked their own (Hanks xlii-xlv). As surnames were imposed on Jews, they frequently took an ornamental name that did not correspond with their circumstances, such as Goldberg—“gold mountain”—or a surrealist name that did not correspond with any worldly circumstances, such as Fischbaum—“fish tree.” (xliv). Such surnames are therefore unusually shallow in their initial reservoir of meaning, which is almost entirely contextual: that of an “artificial” name held by Jews and no one else. Though Stein derives from the Old High German noun for stone and was not one of the many names 285 specifically created for such lists, it was an occasional suffix both in surnames made up whole cloth, such as Edelstein, and surnames derived from place names, such as Rubinstein. Such suffixes frequently became entire surnames during the nominal simplification common during immigration to the United States. As almost all Ashkenazic surnames were about a century old in 1906 and hadn’t had much time to diverge and complicate, they very strongly connoted Jewishness. Stein therefore signified Jewish more than German, and much more than stony. Stein not only means Jewish but also means it more frequently than any other name in the United States. Consider the 1990 U. S. census, the first that recorded ethnicity as well as number and name, where Stein places first in the nominally-Jewish sweepstakes, coming in as the 382nd most popular American surname out of 88,799 in contention, followed by Simon at 438, Solomon at 738, and Levine at 950. (Note that “nominally Jewish” differs from “actually Jewish,” which would place names such as “Miller,” which do not have specifically Jewish connotations but are nonetheless extremely common among Jews, in the top five.) The census depends on self- identification and sampling but nonetheless serves to identify broad markers of Jewishness. Though Biblical names such as Cohen and Levine may signify Jewishness more directly than Stein, no surname in the United States of 1990 signified Jewishness more frequently than Stein. Though the relative popularity of Jewish surnames may have changed since 1910, there are no demographic factors (besides assimilation) for such wholesale change. It’s therefore likely that Stein then as now was perceived as a “Jewish name,” despite those Steins who are not Jews. 286 This perception was particularly important at the turn of the twentieth century, which saw enormous waves of Jewish immigration. The population of American Jews increased from the 250,000 primarily educated and secular German Jews present in 1880 to more than two million (8). This influx of poor Yiddish-speakers fleeing persecution from rural Russia and Eastern Europe increased American anti-semitism in the mass public and the press, and what Jonathan Freedman calls “a surging horde of Ost-Juden” slowed only when the United States activated immigration quotas in 1925 (“Lessons” 426). The relevant question then becomes the position of Stein—a name of German origins, like Stein herself—to this great wave. Did Stein differentiate Stein’s class and domestic credentials differently from those of recent immigrants in a way that might be read by contemporary readers of the New York Press? No. To the great American ear, Stein sounded Jewish, Gertrude Stein was a run-of-the-mill Jewess (at least in terms of ethnicity), and the Judaism of Stein’s public persona was at double strength at a time when Jews were commonly viewed as atypical, inferior Americans. The different original nationalities of Jewish immigrants did not signify, due to historical particulars that caused many Eastern European Jews to have German names. 6 If Judaism, through the Dreyfus affair, is the root of Zola’s public chord, the dominant pitch is Frenchness. “Jewishness,” broadly speaking, was not nearly as attractive to the American public as “Frenchness,” which explains why “A Zolaesque American” showcases French Stein and only connotes Jewish Stein. After all, the article is a puff piece, a page-filler, and not intended to comment upon or change the dominant cultural hierarchy and hegemony. Instead, “A Zolaesque American” is meant to entertain 287 readers of the Press by flattering and informing their sense of cultural sophistication, and thus retain market share. One of the French aspects of the word “Zolaesque” is French naturalism, the genre that made Zola famous enough for J’accuse to register. Zola and De Maupassant were the standard bearers of this late nineteenth-century French literary movement, which, broadly speaking, continued realism’s revolt and was a reaction against romanticism and its championing of the human imagination and free will. Broadly speaking, naturalists are more narrowly focused than realists on the plight of the working class. (The dividing line between French realism—Balzac, Flaubert—and French naturalism—Zola, de Maupassant—is usually held to be the 1860s.) The French Naturalists embraced the materialism that the Romantics acknowledged but made subordinate to the human mind, and happily installed Darwin as a patron saint and held that heredity and environment decided character. The movement in general and Zola in particular were known for raw, relatively sexually explicit, pessimistic fiction that exposed and deplored the material affronts of poverty, and traced how such nature and nurture determined characters and their fates. The American Naturalists arose a generation later, and though they were influenced by the French movement, they neither toed its deterministic party line nor embraced its somewhat-scientific method. Instead, they were preoccupied with the “animal” and irrational. The American Naturalists were defined less by a coherent philosophy than by a generational reaction to taboos against sexuality and violence present in the American realist writers dominant in Stein’s youth, such as Howells, Twain, and early James. 288 Though the American naturalists extended the realm of the representable from the realists’ limited focus upon the middle class and “local color” into polyglot, immigrant, urban working class, they didn’t extend their franchise as far as the poor, rootless, “uninteresting” immigrant servants of Stein’s Three Lives, much less to non-whites. Nor did they usually explore bisexual, lesbian, or otherwise queer women. Those few who did—such as Henry James, who wrote about a (possibly) gay man’s female companion in “The Beast in the Jungle” 7 —rarely referenced female homoeroticism and homosexual acts as directly as Stein in “The Good Anna” and “Melanctha.” Was Stein an American or a French naturalist? And why would the mass market care? To answer the first question, as Stein was an expatriate and thus both French and American, so she was both an American and a French naturalist—and neither. As we have seen, Stein explicitly modeled Three Lives after Flaubert’s Trois Contes, but the novel’s epigraph—Donc je suis un malheureux, et ce n’est ni ma faute ni celle de la vie, or “Then I am unhappy, and it is neither my fault nor the fault of life”—is credited to the Symbolist poet Jules LaForgue. The Symbolists, tardy children of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (1857), rebelled against the French naturalist attention to the plainly-told mundane and instead embraced imagination, dreams, and static narrative structures that served as scaffolding for their tableaus vivantes. The doomy epigraph thus repudiates both the free will protested by the naturalists and the environmental determination they support. That said, any reading of the epigraph is complicated by critics’ inability to find its original context, and the resulting consensus that Stein herself wrote the epigraph and falsely attributed it to LaForgue. 8 Nonetheless, all such distinctions and complications collapse 289 before America-at-large, whose compound eye was likely to find the “inappropriate” subject matter of both the French naturalists and symbolists their most salient characteristic. For while the mass public didn’t care whether Stein was a French or American naturalist, it did care about American identity, was conscious of stereotypical differences between national characters, and was fascinated by “naughty” French sexuality. The American naturalists acted in their national character when they took more inspiration from the French naturalists’ breakage of taboos on what could be represented in fiction, especially in terms of sexuality, than from the highly-developed body of French naturalist literary theory. The placement of France as a site of comparative sexual freedom was and is a longstanding tradition in the Anglo-American world, as can be seen in synonyms for tongue kissing—“French kiss”—and condoms—the archaic “French letter.” For centuries, the French have been viewed by the English (and therefore by the historically dominant American culture) as more fervent, more daring, and especially, more sexually open and expressive. Though this stereotype was grounded in demonstrable cultural differences, it also floated free of the specifics of French culture, and elided ways that the French were decidedly more conservative than the English and Americans, such as the practice of divorce. Many early Twentieth-Century novels published in the United States attest to the difference between the French and Anglo-American acceptance of extramarital sex (advantage: France) and acceptance of divorce (advantage: Anglo- America). For instance, Undine Spragg of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, published in 1913, three years after “A Zolaesque American,” is surprised to find that 290 while the French aristocracy views her refusal to have sex out of marriage quaint, they also believe that her status as a divorcée makes her ineligible for marriage into their circle. The stereotype of French hypersexuality was (and is) particularly strong in terms of literature, painting, and fashion, where “French” has been a byword for the new, experimental, and unconventional, usually with a frisson of sexual impropriety, since at least the seventeenth century. Thus French novels have been understood as representing sexuality in a manner unfit for young girls since the Victorian era. Thus avant-garde and au courant, common English terms of French origin which have long been naturalized but which are still commonly italicized, as “special Frenchness” is essential to their meaning. (Thus as well the possibly excessive use of French in this chapter, which has leaked in from the milieu.) Avant-garde, French for “before the guard,” is defined by the OED as “The pioneers or innovators in any art in a particular period.” Though the OED does not italicize avant-garde, italicization is common. Interestingly, both avant-garde and au courant date as English expressions from the start of the twentieth century, a time when the French (due in large part to modernism) denoted “the new” more than usual. À la mode (according to the fashion) and au fait (to be well instructed in) are near synonyms to avant-garde and au courant, and their naturalization from the French also dates from a time when the French were viewed as especially “advanced” by English speakers: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Again, the common (and technically improper, except in the case of au fait) italicization of all four may be defended through the argument that their French origin is essential to their meaning. In short, Frenchness 291 in general, and French Naturalism in particular, are markers of a broad, sexualized queerness for the au courant readers of The New York Press, and therefore meld with the broad queerness of Jewishness in the broad American eye. Jewish queerness, too, had a sexual aspect. The Nazi reading of Jews as both sexually inferior and sexually perverse—as simultaneously hyper- and asexual, whichever was worse at any given moment—was merely an enhanced version of the anti- semitism pervasive in most of the West. Even to the “naughty” French, the Jew was sexually extreme. Consider the poem “To a Frightful Jewess” (“Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive”) from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), that quintessential fin-de-siècle text. The first stanza follows: One night I lay with a frightful Jewess, Like a cadaver stretched out beside a cadaver, And I began to muse, by that peddled body, About the sad beauty my desire forgoes. (1-4, Trans. Agler) 9 Here, the Jewess in question is contrasted with the narrator’s ideal lover, the “sad beauty” who is later described as a “queen of cruel women” who has “majesté native”—majesty that is native, authentically French, and therefore the real deal (13, 9). Both attraction and repulsion are at work here. Though the Jewess is emphatically not the narrator’s beloved and does not hold a projection of his internal love object, she is a successful mechanism for the fulfillment of his bodily sexual needs. The narrator views this successful capacity for palpable sexual realization as coeval with sex as a “peddled” good in the marketplace, which the narrator’s values position as inferior to sexual idealization. 10 This inferiority is so profound to the post-coital narrator that he and the Jewess lie “like a cadaver stretched out beside a cadaver,” as if only ideal, unrealized 292 sex is “alive.” This traditional virgin/whore binary is hyped by the love object’s “sad beauty,” a characteristic infrequently conflated with sexual fulfillment. Yet the narrator’s successful sexual practice with the Jewess refutes his sexual theory. Clearly, not long before the poem’s regrets, the narrator’s attraction to the Jewess swamped his repulsion. Though these tensions between attraction and repulsion, and between sexual idealization and sexual performance, pervade Les Fleurs du Mal, and though the poems contains a variety of portraits of ethnically non-French women who are presented as somehow more sexual than the French female norm, none combine such hypersexuality with the frightful Jewess’s cadaverous aspect. 11 How then did modernists themselves view Jews, and thus to an extent, Stein? In general, not well. T. S. Eliot has become a (if not the) standard bearer of such anti- semitism among Anglo-American modernists, in part because of Eliot’s high status as a modernist. 12 Though Eliot’s views on Jews were not uncommon, they were stated, and possibly held, with unusual strength. His anti-semitism is brought into even higher relief by his consistent positioning of his narrative voice, in both his essays and his poems, as inhabiting a place above mass culture and consistently lamenting the lost purity and glory of an earlier age. Eliot’s consistent assumption of a pure, glorious standard has probably brought his own thoughts and actions under unusual scrutiny. As anti-semitism is currently viewed as impure and inglorious—a position that it didn’t necessarily hold in Eliot’s day—Eliot’s anti-semitism seems particularly egregious. Apart from Eliot’s correspondence, which remains anti-semitic throughout his life, the clearest example of his published prejudice may be seen in his Poems of 1920. 293 “Gerontion,” “Burbank with A Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “A Cooking Egg" and "Sweeney Among the Nightingales” all offer examples of sexualized anti-semitism almost exactly contemporary with “A Zolaesque American.” Throughout these poems, Eliot leaves “jew” uncapitalized, unlike other nationalities and ethnicities, a common anti-semitic trope that implies that Jews are less than human. (Stein, by contrast, usually leaves all markers of race, ethnicity, and nationality uncapitalized.) This anti-semitic form is matched by the poems’ content. The narrator of “Gerontion,” while setting up his sorry situation as an old man languishing in a boarding house with neither ideals nor physical comforts left intact, laments that My house is a decayed house, And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. (7-10) Here Eliot breathes life into the stereotype of the Jewish slumlord, “spawned” in a Flanders ghetto, who was “blistered” by a venereal disease, probably syphilis or herpes, and “patched and peeled” by remedies that were almost certainly ineffective, as these diseases could not often be cured at this time. Eliot’s lines are made specifically anti- semitic rather than generally misanthropic by a duality Eliot consistently draws between a glorious Anglo-Saxon past and the gross, decadent present day, swarming with parvenu Jews, most nouveau riche, and all over-sexed. For instance, the second poem in the collection, "Burbank with A Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" traces the difference between two Venetian tourists. Where once the heroic Burbank trysted with the nominally-voluptuous Princess Volupine, now there is 294 …Bleistein’s way: A saggy bending of the knees and elbows And elbows, with the palms turned out, Chicago Semite Viennese. (13-16) Once, the Princess Volupine’s “shuttered barge/Burned on the water all the day” (11-12); now, Bleistein puffs on a phallic substitute as “[His] lusterless protrusive eye/stares from the protozoic slime” (17-18). In today’s degenerate Venice, even the princess has declined: Princess Volupine extends A meager, blue-nailed phthisic hand To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, She entertains Sir Ferdinand Klein… (25-29) The enjambment is not only a line and stanza break, but also the last stanza break before the end of the poem—all powered by the shocking revelation that Sir Ferdinand is—a Jew! After this one-two punch of the collection’s first two poems, culture continues to decline in tandem with a Jewish ascent. For instance, in the fourth poem, “A Cooking Egg,” Jews from Jewish neighborhoods of London infiltrate the rest of the city: “The red- eyed scavengers are creeping/From Kentish Town and Golder’s Green” (27). Later in the collection, we observe one of these creeping infiltrators, a Jewish woman who married a Gentile but betrays her racial origins by eating like an animal: “Rachel née Rabinovitch/Tears at grapes with murderous paws” (“Sweeney Among the Nightingales” 23-24). While Eliot generally pictures the present day as degenerate in these misanthropic poems, Jews come in for special attention. 295 I detail Eliot’s anti-semitism to establish how accepted it was in high culture. Though Eliot’s anti-semitism is unusually pointed, it’s hardly unusual among canonical modernist writers and works, who reflect the general tenor of their times. Jonathan Freedman has linked the work of James, Wharton, Fitzgerald, Cather, and Hemingway through a remarkably similar relational logic that uses Jews to define what is present and what is missing in gentiles, for better and for worse. Freedman traces this binary to these writers’ association with “the cultural politics of nostalgia, superannuation, world-weary aestheticism [and] romantic idealism,” and the simultaneous identification of Jews “not only as embodiments of modernity or materialism…but as culture-vultures, avid seekers after the legitimacy of taste or imaginative production, who are all too frequently rewarded for their lack of imaginative amplitude and cultural sophistication, not punished for it” (425). These identifications were based in the lived experience of the typical American aspiring writer: As one set of outsiders—Midwestern Americans like Eliot, Hemingway, Cather…sought to make their mark in the sphere of cultural distinction, they encountered in the salons and cenacles of Paris or Greenwich Village, in the little magazines, in the publishing houses, in the university classrooms (but not the faculty lounges) another set of deracinated outsiders elbowing their way in alongside them, namely assimilating Jews. (425) The resulting simultaneous identification with and othering of Jews led to novels where Jews were both portrayed far from traditional stereotypes, even sympathetically, yet positioned as illegitimate competitors for the artistic excellence and stature the above writers wanted. Jews both signified modernism and were understood as “false” modernists—a construction that, as we shall see, very much suits the understanding of Stein among the intellectual elite of the 20s as both “the real thing” and a fraud. Even if 296 “A Zolaesque American” hadn’t positioned Stein as an important collector of modernist art, her Jewish name alone would have denoted modernism, insofar as the revving engine of mass Jewish immigration and assimilation was as modern, strange, and uncomfortable to the mass public as Modern art. The French and Jewish notes of word “Zolaesque” combine to strike a chord in readers of the Press: That of not being properly American at a time when immigration, nativism, and the question of Who is American? were very much public concerns. As Stein is both (and neither) a French and an American naturalist, so, as an expatriate, she is both (and neither) French and American, neither fowl nor fish. Stein’s indeterminate citizenship as well as “French,” “naturalist,” and “Jewish” are neatly indexed by Zola and the first two sentences of “A Zolaesque American”: Paris has launched another authoress into the limitless field of literature. Miss Gertrude Stein, whose book, “Three Lives,” has just been published, is an American, born in Pennsylvania, but whose early life was spent principally in California. (2:1) Even in the United States, Stein’s identity is unstable. Is she from California or Pennsylvania? Though the Press carefully details Stein’s American pedigree, it also specifies that she was “launched” by Paris—the Paris that in the context of the connotations triggered by “Zolaesque,” dovetails with her Jewishness and her queer sexuality. The sole bit of literary criticism in the squib’s six paragraphs (which appears at the very end, as if to fulfill a length requirement) makes the Zola/Stein/Jewish/French/ Naturalist/Sexualized Naughtiness nexus explicit: “In her writing Miss Stein leans toward materialism. Many incidents in her book…are Zolaesque in plainness of treatments, and one wonders if the reserved American taste will rebel” (2:1). 297 Such impropriety dovetails with the last pitch of the Zola-esque chord: iconoclasm, and the leadership of others athwart to society. Stein, like Zola, is willing to stand against convention. She is a “woman of strong personality, independence of thought, and the utter disdain of conventionalities…she possesses a small fortune, and she is not controlled by nor does she fear the criticism of others” (1). Like Zola, she bears the standard of a movement: “The little coterie of old friends who have long been associated with Miss Stein eagerly awaited this first production” (1). All these attributes mark her as queer in terms of gender; though the women’s suffrage movement frequently brought women of “strong personality, independence of thought, and the utter disdain of conventionalities” to the public eye in the 1910s, such women remained queer. The article clarifies that Stein is intrinsically special: “even in the doll stage the authoress gave evidence of an unusual mind” (1). Stein is positioned as broadly queer from birth, the baby born with the caul. All that said, “iconoclasm” has its social advantages. For instance, Zola ends his J’accuse with the following statement of defiance: “My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let [those I accuse] dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight! I am waiting.” Zola truly was iconoclastic, insofar as he publicly and directly challenged traditional beliefs, customs, and values, so much so that he was kicked out of the Legion of Honor and exiled. At the same time, J’accuse rejuvenated Zola’s public profile and increased his sales both within and without France. This increase was due in part to the recovery of Zola’s reputation as a socially progressive rebel, which was initially instituted by the call for social reform at 298 the center of his magnum opus, the 20 novels collectively known as Les Rougon- Macquart, which were no longer chic. With “J’accuse!” Zola was back in vogue. In this sense, J’accuse! was not iconoclasm but good publicity. Similarly, Stein’s iconoclasm wasn’t so iconoclastic—at least not as transmitted by The New York Press—that she couldn’t be comfortably placed as just another placeholder of the madcap au courant, the outrageous avant-garde, as fashionable then as now. 13 In fact, what seems to have made Stein newsworthy to the New York Press was the extent to which she fits the tradition of Parisian outrageousness that extends from the Wilde persona through the decadents to the image of the female decadent then embodied by such figures as Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, and Dolly Wilde, none of whom were well-known to the broad public at the time. (Of the three, the most broadly known was Barnes, who did not become a widely-published journalist until 1912, two years after “A Zolaesque American,” and who did not become a public figure in her own right till the 1920s.) Portraits of such figures, when dentatured of much of their lesbian sexuality, were easily absorbed in the intellectual, sophisticated, broadly queer population that fascinated the readers of the New York Press. Such figures therefore helped the New York Press retain its market niche and remain profitable. If Stein’s “iconoclasm” had truly overturned traditional beliefs, customs, and values, as the word strictly requires, then it would not be reported. And Stein’s lesbianism was not, though it’s reasonable to assume that the unnamed writer, who was familiar enough with Stein to write about her as a public figure before anyone else did, knew about Stein’s sexuality, as she and Toklas had been living openly as a couple for several years. 299 If, in 1910, the headline “A Zolaesque American” rang a Jewish chime, a Naturalist chime, a French chime, and an iconoclastic chime , does the body of the article fulfill the promise of its title? Yes. The article’s primary message is that Stein is a consumer, producer, and most importantly, embodiment of “peculiarity”; she is not only an avatar of esoterica but also a judge of its merit, “one of the first to discover great merit in that revolutionary and eccentric painter, Henri Matisse” (Zolaesque 2:1). Stein is not only a critic of visual iconoclasm but also a visual iconoclasm herself. Stein’s look—her physicalized persona—is the primary focus of the article, and I read her repudiation of feminine standards as an explicit politics. Though there is no illustration of Stein in the Press, her clothes are carefully described: For a street costume she wears always a brown corduroy suit, a short coat, and small, inconspicuous hat. When the telltale signs of wear and tear appear Miss Stein simply orders a duplicate to be made with no change in material or style….she walks the streets of Paris in brown sandals regardless of the many impertinent glances that she is forced to encounter. (2:1) Stein’s iconoclasm extends beneath her clothes to her body itself: The homely axiom “laugh and grow fat” certainly applies to Miss Stein…. to quote one of the characters in her book, her avoirdupois is of the “spreading kind.” The corset, that modern invention for the suppression of unruly flesh, is an unknown article in the simple wardrobe of Miss Stein. (2:1) As told by the Post, all Stein’s visual attributes refute traditional femininity. She wears a “male” color and fabric, and repudiates the large “female” hat. She does not express herself through conspicuous display—or more precisely, she eschews the variety and neatness of dress that express conventional feminine vanity. Yet while Stein actively refuses to change her costume, she nonetheless maintains it with a dandy’s precision. 300 Her simultaneous attention to visuality and repudiation of the dominant visual hierarchy meshes with the modernist project of Matisse and other modernists. The Press extends Stein’s visual perversion to her body, which does not fulfill contemporary standards of feminine beauty and is not subjected to the usual means for attaining it: the corset. Instead, Stein’s flesh is unruly and excessive. The Press draws a full picture of Stein’s iconoclasm and broad queerness, and offers signifiers of specific same-sexuality for those who can see them. Stein offers a striking female image to eyes who aren’t looking for conventional feminine representation, but who do want, in the words of just one sentence of the Press, a “homely,” “laughing,” “character” with “avoirdupois” of the “spreading kind.” The Press frames its description as one drawn from Stein’s own work—“to quote one of the characters in her book”—as if Stein is so unusual that her excessive body can only described in her own words (2:1). Stein’s visual oddity is layered: Her “unruly flesh” is contained in manly clothes. To contemporaries primed by their own dissident desires to carefully scan cultural ephemera for signs of non-normative female sexual desire and expression, this description screams “Queer here!” and for some, more specifically, “Lesbian here!” well before Stein’s look becomes a standard visual shorthand of lesbian identity. Here we enter territory familiar from the public life of Capote, whose own broad queerness and specific homosexuality was expressed most clearly through visual means. Such visual interpretation becomes a standard rubric for Stein, especially after her debut as a national celebrity during the Armory Show. 301 Stein, The Armory Show, and “La Grand Fête Americaine” The Armory Show is a mandatory stop on any sensible tour of modernist history in America. Before the Association of American Painters and Sculptors sponsored the show, younger artists, especially young, orthodox artists, had essentially no opportunity to show their work in the United States. The painter Walt Kuhn, executive secretary of the exhibition, notes that before the show, “No dealers were open to [younger artists], the press in general was apathetic, maybe one in a thousand of our citizens had a slight idea of the meaning of the word ‘art’” (5). Twenty-five years later, Kuhn offered a broad perspective on the show’s importance, which went beyond the association’s goal to increase the profile and acceptance of contemporary art: We naïve artists, we wanted to see what was going on in the world of art, we wanted to open up the mind of the public to the need of art. Did we do it? We did more than that.….The exhibition affected every phase of American life—the apparel of men and women, the stage, automobiles, airplanes, furniture, interior decorations, beauty parlors, plumbing, hardware—everything from the modernistic designs of gas pumps and added color of beach umbrellas and bathing suits, down to the merchandise of the dime store. In spite of the number of admittedly first class pieces of “fine art” in the Armory Show, the thing that “took” was the element of decoration. American business, perhaps unconsciously absorbed this needed quality and reached with it, into every home and industry and pastime. (24-5) In this section, I will show how the extraordinary impact of the Armory Show on American culture lent some of its force to Stein’s authorial persona, due to Stein’s association with the show. From February 17 to March 15, 1913, 1,250 artworks by over 300 avant-garde artists were shown in the vast confines of the New York City 69th Regiment Armory. 14 302 The show overwhelmed an American public whose artistic exposure had been restricted to more realist representations. Though the cultural elite was already familiar with European artistic movements, the public had no defense against the Impressionists, Cubists, Futurists, and Fauves. These European invaders, most of whom called France their native or adopted home, strafed American aesthetic sensibilities in a manner worthy of the Armory’s regular lodgers, the U.S. 69 th Infantry Regiment. 15 And as “The Fighting 69 th ” would be sent off to France five years later, so the Armory Show marched to Chicago and Boston. Its critical reception was less friendly in Chicago than in New York, and hostile in Boston, but the show was and enormous popular success in all three cities, and had a significant impact on public sensibility. The Armory Show received more attention in the press than any event in the world of arts and literature since the Wilde trials. Coverage of the Dreyfus Affair, for instance, was nowhere near as pervasive. Furthermore, neither the Wilde trials nor the Dreyfus affair were American, and therefore were easier for the American public to dismiss as foreign, and irrelevant to their direct experience. By contrast, the Armory Show invaded American soil. In addition, though Wilde and Zola were primary characters in their respective scandals, the scandals themselves were not about art, while the Armory Show was a scandal about art. Despite our current pride on the sophistication and pervasiveness of American apparatuses of mass culture, no artistic event since the Armory Show has caused such mass scandal and exerted such lasting artistic influence. The contestants—the quiz show scandals of the 1950s? Woodstock? The birth of MTV?—are enfeebled by the comparison. Only technological innovations such as the 303 development of color film have had a comparable affect. The most notorious work of art at the Armory Show was Marcel Duchamp’s cubist, futurist Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (fig.11), which was frequently parodied in the popular press (fig. 12), and which itself became a symbol of the show as a Fig. 11: Nude Descending a Staircase, #2, Marcel Duchamp, 1912 Fig. 12: “The Rude Descending a Staircase (Rush Hour at the Subway),” The Evening Sun, March 20, 1913. whole (fig.13). Why? The obvious answer is Duchamp’s fragmented representation of the nude—but much of the public heard the painting’s name before they saw it. What did the public hear and imagine? Staircases were unusual in portraits, but they were not inherently transgressive. For instance, Renoir’s Woman upon a Staircase of 1876 (fig. 14), though perhaps uncomfortably Impressionist in its rendering to American audiences, nonetheless portrays a well-dressed, apparently respectable woman in a properly 304 Fig. 13: U. S. commemorative stamp of Armory Show patrons observing Nude Descending, 1998. Fig. 14: Woman upon a Staircase, Auguste Renoir, 1876 luxurious and fashionable setting. She is even part of a matched set, with Man upon a Staircase (1876). No great scandal there. The problem with Nude Descending a Staircase began with its title. When Duchamp offered the piece to be shown at the Salon des Indépendants, an important exhibition of Cubist works in Paris, he was asked to either remove its title or withdraw the piece; Duchamp withdrew. The title denoted a portrait of a woman, as the figure was nude and therefore almost certainly a woman, as for centuries, the female nude was considered both more ornamental and more suitable for the public gaze than the male. The conventional eroticism of a picture of a nude woman was freshened by the unusual activity figured in the title. This nude figure was walking down the stairs rather than reclining on a divan, or offering another passive pose for delectation. Furthermore, the woman’s descent could easily be understood as allegorical, as a moral descent to a lower, 305 less civilized, and more animalistic form of sexuality. The title therefore indicated a standard scandal of representation, the type of nude portrayal that had been attracting media attention, high prices, and moral condemnation for centuries. Beyond the title, however, only the outrage was familiar. Through formal innovation, Duchamp not only exposed the mechanics underlying human grace but also doubly denaturalized his nude by executing his superimposed successive frames in harsh, angular, energetic cubist planes. His portrait resembled a superimposition of Eadward Muybridge’s high-speed photography, or of successive frames of a roll of cinematic film, both of which were well known at the time. Duchamp’s repudiation of contemporary figuration was more outrageous than almost any ordinary representation of a naked woman might be, and made the standard sensuality associated with a salon picture of a nude—whether descending a staircase or not— extreme. Duchamp thus refuted the conventions of the female nude, and presented his descending woman as vital yet profoundly “unfeminine”—the obscenity that presumably led to the Salon des Indépendants’ request that he change the title if he wanted to keep the painting in the exhibition. The sexual shock of Nude Descending only accentuated the distress and titillation of an American public (and before it, a French public) almost entirely unfamiliar with non-realist art. Who knew what was really depicted in Duchamp’s lines? Who could say what law-abiding, god-fearing Americans were unknowingly exposed to? In a world where traditional naturalist representation might be flouted, all decent, sensible customs 306 and laws were at risk. Novelty and indeterminacy gave the “naughtiness” inherent in Duchamp’s title an unfamiliar power, and offered a new frisson to the jaded palate. As Nude Descending a Staircase was the most frequently mentioned work in the Armory Show, and as Duchamp’s painting was shorthand for the show in full, so the painting accentuated and sexualized the queerness already inherent in the show’s revolution of representation. The French pedigree of many modern artists and artworks further inflamed these sexual connotations. Modernism entered the vocabulary and consciousness of the United States under a queer, broadly sexualized spotlight. The halo of this strong beam of light caught Gertrude Stein, who herself became apparent to the public eye. Stein’s association with modernism predated the Armory Show, which left her well placed to become the American writer most associated with the modernists by the mass public of her time. Stein had been associated with the pictorial modernists—both as an art collector and as a colorful Parisian spectacle—since the birth of her public persona in the February 13, 1910 “A Zolaesque American” (New York Press). Articles such as the June 21, 1914 “Have the Steins Deserted Matisse, Artist They Made Famous?” (also in the New York Press) replenished the association, as did numerous brief mentions of Stein in articles about modernist painters. For an elite few, Stein’s association with the pictorial modernists had extended past collections and cliques since 1912, when her word-portraits “Pablo Picasso” and “Henri Matisse” were offered to the rarified readership of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work in an August “special number” devoted to the painters. 307 Stein’s use of the word “portrait” for these essays accords with her attempt to replicate aspects of her subjects’ pictorial styles in her prose, as seen in the following passage from “Henri Matisse.” Here Stein both dramatizes and parallels through her prose style Matisse’s struggle for and eventual success at creating a new pictorial language that illustrated familiar objects in an unfamiliar way. Stein defamiliarizes the cliché of the groundbreaking yet insecure artist, and forces her reader to actively enter such an artist’s state of mind. Her depiction of Matisse gaining confidence in the merits of his original style easily translates to her own growth in confidence with her own style—a transfer further greased by Stein’s slippery use of the pronoun one. One was quite certain that for a long part of his being one being living he had been trying to be certain that he was wrong in doing what he was doing and then when he could not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing, when he had completely convinced himself that he would not come to be certain that he had been wrong in doing what he had been doing he was really certain then that he was a great one and he certainly was a great one. (Selected 329) Stein’s re-envisioning of one of the great clichés about the artistic process parallels Duchamp’s reinvigorating of a woman walking down a staircase, and mirrors his technique of picturing the object from many angles at (almost) the same time. And like the art of Duchamp, Matisse, and the other modern artists, Stein’s work was both easy for the public to tag as “new,” and difficult for it to understand, much less appreciate. This difficulty was not necessarily in the work itself, but in its repudiation of traditional representation. We see in “Henri Matisse” an example of how Stein’s broad queerness and specific homosexuality was worked out on a textual level by different readers. The broader public was likely to avert its eyes from such passages, which, like 308 much of Stein’s writing, do not offer up a transparent window upon their subject but require unusual attention. Readers unwilling to make this effort take away only that Stein is esoteric, difficult, and mysterious. These readers hold Stein in whatever regard they hold the esoteric; she becomes a placeholder for an aesthetic judgment that is already held. Stein is thus marked as broadly queer and able to bear any number of associations by those who either identify with or against the “wrong.” For those who contemporaries who did read “Henri Matisse,” the passage may simply be understood as clever wordplay, or as a parody of Matisse’s insecurity. At the same time, Stein’s quote is extraordinarily specific as to the internal process of gaining confidence in a new way of being and doing that one must convince oneself is not wrong. Stein is not, however, specific about what kind of new “being” and “doing” is discussed. Those who are sexually queer and those who are familiar with Stein’s biography and persona may understand this passage as a meditation on the solidification of sexual desires and activities that the beholder must convince oneself is not “wrong,” but rather proof that one is “a great one.” This interpretation validates and empowers those who have similarly struggled to achieve not only a non-normative identity based on their sexual desires but also pride—and the fact that Stein often referred to herself as “a great one” offers the possibility that the passage is autobiography to those readers who knew her. At the same time, this passage may be understood as a parody of Matisse’s insecurity. Stein privately printed another word portrait in 1912: A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. This portrait is a textually cubist rendering of the home of Stein’s 309 friend, the heiress and arts patron Mabel Dodge: “A walk that is not stepped where the floor is covered is not in the place where the room is entered. The whole one is the same. There is not any stone. There is the wide door that is narrow on the floor. There is all that place” (10). 16 Dodge subsidized the publication of A Portrait, and only three hundred copies were produced, to be offered as gifts. Despite this extremely limited publication, Mabel Dodge was fundamental to the establishment of Stein’s persona. This was due to the publication of “Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose,” Mabel Dodge’s article on Stein, which was an important mechanism through which Stein’s association with the visual modernists became public knowledge. In its first appearance, Dodge’s article closed a special issue of the high-end periodical Arts and Decoration (March 1913), which served as advance publicity for the Armory Show and was available at the show itself. This special issue served as a quasi- official program for the Show, and offered an “Explanatory Statement” that presented the “aim” of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in sponsoring the show. Dodge’s article was also reprinted in the June 13 Camera Work, as Steiglitz made hay from his prior connection with Stein. Arts and Decoration was roughly comparable to today’s Architecture Today: a periodical read by the trade, yes, but aimed primarily at an upper-class, artistic, monied audience who conflated art with decoration, and who wished to substantiate its rarified taste and intellect by reading the magazine. Dodge’s article is set at the end of the issue, a place of importance. This positioning made “Impressions” parallel to the frontispiece, a short paean to the future written by Van Gogh in an archaic style and set in large type 310 with a dropped initial, as in a medieval manuscript. This frontispiece embodied the Show’s links to the past, and its claims that Modern art was as valuable as antique art. In contrast to the antique lay-out of the frontispiece, the first page of Dodge’s article wrapped around an photograph of a Cubist sculpture by Constantin Brancusi: Mademoiselle Pogany, identified as “Portrait of Mlle. Pognay” (fig. 15). Fig. 15: Layout of Arts & Decoration, p. 172. This sculpture, unreferenced in the article, offers the largest departure from traditional aesthetics of all the art illustrated in this issue of Arts and Decoration, including work by Matisse (2), Derain, Cézanne, Van Gough, Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Degas, Delacroix, Courbet, Ingres, Daumier, Redon, Kuhn, Jo Davidson, and Augustus John. Dodge/Stein is therefore presented not only as parallel to Van Gogh in importance, due to its placement, but also as parallel with the most radical art in the show. Dodge/Stein is also the only one of the ten essays that isn’t directly concerned with visual art and visual artists—an oddity explained by Dodge’s treatment of Stein as a visual artist who works in 311 the medium of words. 17 Dodge’s fortune and social position gave her words considerable weight among the journalists and member of the cultural elite who were obliged by profession and self- definition to consider seriously the climactic article of one of the most important upper- class, high-cultural periodicals of its day, especially when this particular issue of Arts & Decoration was the de facto program of the show. Dodge’s profile of Stein has three primary claims, which are repeated throughout the article. First: Stein is a genius, and anyone who disagrees is wrong. Second: Stein’s art is the essence of the “new,” and whoever disagrees is an idiot, or at the least, in “the sad plight which the dogmatist defines as being a condition of spiritual non-receptivity” (172). Third: Stein’s art is parallel to that of the pictorial modernists, who are also geniuses who traffic in the new. These repetitive foci were leavened with details of Stein’s working habits and descriptions of the aesthetic aims and methods of the artists at hand. In an impressive bit of logrolling, the article is sprinkled with quotes from Stein’s A Portrait of Mabel Dodge, which Dodge offered as proof of her claims. In short, Dodge’s article firmly established Stein’s association with modern art—an association that greatly inflated Stein’s public persona through the powerful bellows of the Armory Show. “Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose” was essential to the establishment of Stein’s status as the American literary analogue of the French modernists, but even though Dodge’s article appeared in the issue of Arts and Decoration that served as the show’s unofficial program, the article still had a limited distribution and did not make much of an impression on the masses. To see how Stein and her work were understood 312 by John Q. and Jane Q. Public from the start of her national reputation, we must turn to the first extended treatment of Stein in a national magazine: “La Grand Fête Americaine,” in the March 22, 1913 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. “La Grand Fête Americaine”: Stein on the National Stage “La Grand Fête” is the fictional report of a party in the Latin Quarter of Paris: “a patriotic tribute from one republic to another, and an incidental testimonial of the love and affection of the propriety to the Americans of the Quarter who drink their coffee in his place in such numbers” (10). As a parody, the article indicates how Stein is configured not as an author to be read and understood, but as a celebrity to gawk at, who produced curiosities to wonder at, rather than read. “La Grande Fête Americaine” was only the first of a series of extended treatments of Stein’s persona in periodicals with a national reach, and she was frequently mentioned in regional newspapers’ coverage of the Armory Show. When “La Grand Fête Americaine” was published, the Saturday Evening Post was the most successful and influential magazine in the United States. 18 The Post was unusual in its policy of paying writers on acceptance rather than publication, which attracted Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, and other well-known writers and frequent contributors. The best-known contributor to the Post was artist Norman Rockwell, whose images of idealized, small- town Americana were frequently on the cover of the Post, and who became strongly identified with the Post itself. The first of Rockwell’s 322 covers for the Post didn’t 313 appear till May 20, 1916, three years after La Grande Fête, but Rockwell’s enormous success with Post readers nonetheless indicates aspects of their typical mindset (fig. 16). Broadly speaking, the Post offered middlebrow and middle-class Americans entertainment, information, and politics from coast to coast. 19 This audience, broadly speaking, was much more likely to appreciate Rockwell’s art than the modernists. This audience, again broadly speaking, also would have both known and disapproved of the Armory Show. At first glance, Rockwell’s first cover for the Saturday Evening Post, drawn when the artist was eighteen, affirms traditional gender roles. Fig. 16: First Norman Rockwell Post cover, 3 September 1916 Rockwell illustrates the misery of the inappropriately well-dressed boy who not only wheels a baby in its carriage but also carries a baby bottle in his suit jacket pocket. Is his 314 misery his own unhappiness at walking the baby and therefore not performing masculinity? Or is it the result of the two boys in baseball uniform who link propriety, class, and effeminacy through one boy’s mocking of good manners (the raising of the baseball cap with the pinky extended, the fatuous look), and the other boy’s faux- feminine expression and finger placement, coupled with an expression of faux-idiocy? In either case, the misery of those who forsake proper boyishness for effeminate dress and feminine behavior is portrayed. 20 At the same time, Rockwell doesn’t just support the hegemonic order. He provides—and The Saturday Evening Post distributes—a beautifully-rendered representation of a deviant, effeminate, maternal boy who succeeds in getting attention from jocks. By representing same-sex coupling and fathering, the illustration speaks to the anxieties about present after a war that destabilized the experience and understanding of masculinity and femininity. Furthermore, Rockwell’s subsequent reputation as a gentle humorist makes it unlikely that viewers were meant to understand the baseball boys’ behavior as cruel, or the perambulator boy’s misery as inappropriate or grave. As with Stein, Rockwell is incorporated and interpellated by hegemony. But there are other registers there for those who can see them. Nonetheless, the twentieth-century American coupling of avant-garde art with effeminacy and refinement makes it probably that if the Post’s readers had to decide which of the three boys were most likely to be associated with the Armory Show, they would pick the unhappy one, and laugh at his fate. “La Grand Fête Américaine” was written by Samuel G. Blythe, then a prominent non-fiction writer and humorist, and illustrated by May Wilson Preston, both of whom 315 were familiar to readers of the Post. Blythe wrote a number of pieces for the Post, some of which were later published individually, such as his chronicle of his retreat from alcohol: “Cutting It Out: How To Get on the Waterwagon and Stay There” (1912). Other publications include The Fun of Getting Thin: How To Be Happy and Reduce the Waistline (1912) and the novel Hunkins (1919). May Wilson was a successful illustrator and painter who agitated for women’s rights for most of her life, beginning with challenging her right as a female student to attend life drawing classes at the Art Students League in New York, where she studied under Robert Henri. Wilson married another artist, James Moore Preston, and took his name. Though Blythe does not mention the Armory Show in the article, the French setting and the quantity of satirized artworks make it likely that Blythe wrote with it in mind, as the show had been running for more than a month when “La Grande Fête” was published. Preston herself exhibited at the Armory Show as a member of the Ash-can School, which was roughly analogous in literature to American Naturalists such as Dreiser, Crane, and early Stein, who also exhibited “ash cans” in their work: gritty, urban material that had been previously censored. 316 Fig. 17: “Mimi was a very lively and adorable Comanche.” May Wilson Preston. Nonetheless, Preston’s drawings are very much of a piece with her and other magazine work of time, and her contributions to “La Grande Fête” illustrate the parody without stylistically referencing the Armory Show (fig. 17). Regardless of Blythe’s and Preston’s intentions, the editors of the Post certainly had the show in mind, as the Post was published weekly, and had to keep current. Though Blythe’s work has received effectively no consideration in Stein criticism, “La Grand Fête” is both hard evidence and an invaluable insight to the shape of Stein’s persona as it becomes nationally known. In the parody, Blythe presents Stein and her writing as so famous that no name is necessary; he liberally quotes her but never identifies the author. Blythe also presents Stein and her writing as so extraordinary that no parody of her is necessary. Stein’s quotes are left unaltered, un-mocked, and un- 317 misinterpreted. Blythe (and his editors) assume that readers of the Saturday Evening Post need no help to find Stein ridiculous, farcical, and extraordinarily queer. I read Blythe’s parody of expatriates and French views of America as a mirror of the Armory Show, the French equivalent to the American furor around the modernists, most of whom called France their native or adopted home. Stein is the Duchamp of the Grand Fête, and her Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia holds the same place of honor and extremity that Nude Descending a Staircase did for the Armory Show. She needs no ironic reversal, satiric exaggeration, or other satiric dressing from Blythe to make his parody climax. Stein’s persona in “La Grand Fête Americaine” rings the same chimes of her persona as “A Zolaesque American,” though in a different chord. Jewishness is played down in the mix; naturalism is superseded by modernism; and Frenchness, expatriation, and, especially, iconoclasm, take lead. Stein is the finale of a “Great American Party” that sees French chorus girls in Indian costumes and long yellow wigs perform tableaux of “that life in America with which the French are so familiar,” including the “Invasion des Comanches, a most terrifying onslaught of Indian warrioresses dressed in the latest Parisian styles” (10-11). This “patriotic tribute from one republic to another” satirizes French misunderstandings of America—the Comanches offer as “perfect representations of Americans as…can be found at any Paris fête”—and present a picture of the States through a queer, sexualized lens (10). For instance, the French understand “La Marche Americaine”—the march under which the United States goes to war and represents itself at important international events—to be the song “Everybody’s Doing It” (10-11). The 318 lyrics of this Irving Berlin dance tune equate dancing with sex in the service of innuendo. Consider the chorus of this national march: Ev'rybody's doin' it, doin' it, doin' it Ev'rybody's doin' it, doin' it, doin' it See that ragtime couple over there Watch them throw their shoulders in the air Snap their fingers, honey, I declare It’s a bear, it’s a bear, it’s a bear, there. 21 The sheet music illustrates the intimacy of the dancers’ clutch through the drawing on its cover, which shows two figures glued together from groin to head. The open mouth and closed eyes of the woman, the heavy-lidded gaze of the man, and the pitching of the woman’s torso into the man’s all indicate sexual abandon. She literally hangs on him, dependant on his stance to keep her upright, and the sash of her dress also reads as the naked flesh of her back revealed by her torso’s pitch, and by his clutching hands (fig. 18). Fig. 18: “Everybody’s Doing It Now,” 1911. Lester S. Levy Collection, Johns Hopkins. 319 Blythe dramatizes a French understanding of the United States as a queer country: devoted to flirtation, physically rigorous rhythmic motion, and trendy slang, and unconcerned with making sense. The article both mocks the French—the Indian warrior maidens, in long yellow wigs, “wore paper headdresses and carried tomahawks, and the carnage was something frightful”—and makes a case for their queer vision (11). Blythe asks, “Who wouldn’t prefer to be tomahawked by a Comanche who wears a pink silk dress and gold slippers and has a dimple in her chin to eating ham and eggs?” (11). In other words, the French misapprehension of America has merit, though it is effeminate, infantile, and fundamentally mistaken about the American bedrock symbolized by standard, wholesome breakfast foods. The fête progresses through various travesties, including a literary program with a ridiculous sonnet of praise, a tribute to American aviation complete with wind-up planes, and a tableau vivante of “Oncle Sam” with a monocle, black beard, and 33 “daughters” dressed in the stars and stripes. The fête seems chaotic but is actually highly programmed, with scheduled poetry readings (the sonnet “À L’Américaine”), a musical interlude (“La Marche Américaine”), and dancehall skits-cum-performance-art (“The Raid of the Pink Comanches”). All the artworks are ridiculed in the same register: mistranslations of both French and American culture and artifacts into something more sexual and fun. For instance, the dull, respectable sonnet “À L’Américaine,” once translated by the party’s itinerant students, becomes ridiculous, and La Fayette, suivant la jeune soldatesque,/ Deploya l’étamine à l’azur étoile;/ Et, du soleil ardent, brusquement 320 dévoilé becomes “And Lafayette, who was some kid, believe me,/Ripped the upholstery out of the azure sky/And told the burning sun where to get off” (10). The sexuality of the party is also strictly confined, with men and women adhering to traditional gender roles—with one important exception: a fan of Gertrude Stein. Any other seeming transgressions are at bottom ornamental flourishes meant to prime the standard sexual pump. Consider Preston’s illustration of Mimi, “the very lively and adorable Comanche” who wears a Scottish kilt with her Indian headdress and plays the tambourine (10)—as reflected in Preston’s illustration (fig. 17). Mimi is not genderqueer! The party’s “chaos” only truly goes out of bounds with Stein’s “Portrait,” which closes the show. By two o’clock the whole place was a whirl of laughing, shouting, pirouetting girls and boys, singing, dancing, throwing confetti, sailing their rubber pigs in the air, scattering flowers about, pledging one another eternal devotion, trying to talk French and trying to talk English—a rollicking, childishly amused gathering, having a heap of very innocent fun. Then there came a sensation. A tall, pale, serious young man rose…As an American he desired to read a few extracts from the greatest work of the century—a work destined to go down the ages as imperishable prose. He alluded to a work he held in his hand, a small pamphlet with a gaudy cover of flowered paper, and straightaway he began to read. (11) Blythe then directly quotes long passages from A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia, and shows us how Stein’s work frightens, angers, and estranges the partiers. Blythe never names Stein, but he does name A Portrait of Mabel Dodge, though only after he’s finished quoting from it. Does he assume that his audience will know A Portrait from its style, and connect both with Stein, or does he make an inside joke? Probably both. To an extent, Blythe’s audience is self-selected. Those readers most interested in France and the avant-garde are those most likely to read his parody and 321 most likely to have heard of Stein. In addition, “La Grande Fête” coincides with the Armory Show and Mabel Dodge’s article on Stein and A Portrait, all of which had an extremely high profile. Last, it bears repeating that though modernist writers had very few readers at this time, this did not mean in any sense that they were not well known. Public interest in the modernists skyrocketed with the Armory Show, and public familiarity (though not knowledge, per se) with high modernist art would soon be commonplace. We have already seen that when Stein’s poetry collection Tender Buttons was published the year after the Armory Show, it earned tremendous press and few readers. And public interest in modernist writers continued to grow, until, as Karen Leick observes, “it would have been difficult for any literate American to remain unaware of modernists like Joyce and Stein in the 1920s, since their publications in little magazines were discussed so frequently in daily newspapers and popular magazines” (126). Mainstream American interest in the modernists can be dated from the Armory Show; the cultural literacy that Leick observes is beginning to coagulate as “La Grande Fête” appears. And so, while some of Blythe’s readers may have had no inkling of Stein and A Portrait of Mabel Dodge, it seems likely that many of these readers were sufficiently informed. If not, the editors of The Saturday Evening Post, which has few inside jokes of this type, would have been unlikely to publish “La Grande Fête,”. Whether or not the readers of the Saturday Evening Post were familiar with Stein, they would have understood that her work doesn’t fit within the confines of the carnival in “La Grande Fête.” Even in the context of this celebration of the foreign, Stein is too 322 foreign. The Stein reading “was a weird scene. By this time even the Comanches had ceased waving their tomahawks” (32). Stein provides a farther order of strange: Those who were listening pinched themselves to find whether they were not asleep. They glanced round apprehensively to see whether their minds were working They start to protest in confusion—“What is it?” cried the merrymakers. “What is it?”—and anger—“Hey stop it! Stop it!” yelled a big American. ‘Either you’re crazy or I am.” (11) A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia threatens the order of the party in terms of both the content of Stein’s work and of how and by whom it is read. A Portrait isn’t read as part of the literary program. Instead, it is an impromptu eruption by a “the tall, serious, pale young man.” The young man’s manner differentiates him, and his paleness reverberates with his refusal of the heterosexual bacchanalia to indicate a repudiation of “normal,” “healthy,” sensuality that should set the blood running and bring a flush to the face at a party such as this. This differentiation suits the text itself, which Blythe doesn’t satirize but directly quotes. “La Grand Fête Americaine” includes eight substantial passages, most whole paragraphs, taken directly from A Portrait of Mabel Dodge, as if no summary or parody can achieve the same reaction as Stein’s text. These excerpts do not suit the conventional, sophomoric hijinks of la grande fête: So much breathing has not the same place when there is that much beginning. So much breathing has not the same place when the ending is lessening. So much breathing has the same place and there must not be so much suggestion. There can be there the habit that there is if there is no need of resting. The absence is not alternative. (Qtd. on Blythe 11) The connotations of the particulars of rhythmic breathing and their delineation in relation to states of mind are undeniably sexual, but they cannot be parsed in terms of 323 conventional frolic, and cannot be easily subsumed to the usual byplay of sex and gender incorporated in the raid of the pink Comanches, at least not as told by Blythe. The “dazed listeners” attempt to place and categorize the reading, guessing that A Portrait is “cubist,” “futurist,” and “rhythmist writing.” The pale young man refuses to engage, repeating only “It is the word” (32). This reference to the Christian sacred is accented by the young man’s treatment of “A Portrait” as a sacred text: he “lifted the little paper-covered book to his lips and kissed it reverently” (32). The young man’s devotion is so strong that he refuses to stop his testimony. Even after he is hauled from the stage by the crowd and sat on by marauding students, he keeps clasping “his little paper-covered book to his heart and his eyes were rolling in a fine frenzy” (32). This parody of devotion to art reaches back to Wilde and Aestheticism, which, as we will see later in the chapter, strongly affects Stein’s public persona. Indeed, “La Grand Fête” can be seen as broadly “decadent,” a stringently updated version of the parodies that circulated in the United States when Oscar Wilde went on tour in 1882, and were still in the living memory of many of the readers of the Saturday Evening Post. 22 Blythe was at the impressionable age of 14 when Wilde went on tour, and as the Armory Show was one of the very few artistic events that could compare with Wilde’s tour and later trial, it was sensible for Blythe to hearken back to parodies of aestheticism to anchor his parody of modernism. Though Blythe’s narrator dismisses the Aesthetic young man and A Portrait of Mabel Dodge as “a bore,” his boredom is contraindicated when he breaks the detachment that he maintains for the rest of the parody to rescue the young man from the students. 324 The narrator tells us “I couldn’t get him to say more than It is the word! But I kept the book and have quoted literally what he read” (32). The narrator’s copious, even excessive, quoting of Stein, coupled with Blythe’s decision not to make any editorial commentary on the contents of A Portrait, materially validates the pale young man’s wonder, and to an extent, his treatment of the text as sacred: something that may neither be stifled nor changed. “La Grande Fête” thus both enshrines Stein in the realm of the broadly, traditionally queer and marks her as somehow belonging to a deeper order of strange. The overall affect is that Stein and A Portrait of Mabel Dodge, like Duchamp and Nude Descending a Staircase, is presented as containing a hard, undigestably foreign center that supports the superficial media explosion that coruscates and swirls around her in a sweet, sticky froth. She is an objet d’art that serves well as a curio for a bourgeois living room—unless the objet is observed too closely, and estranges the Saturday Evening Post reader from a Rockwellian worldview that sentimentalizes small-town America and traditional values of traditional representations. The Armory Show linked Stein to modernism, but the 1914 publication of Tender Buttons, which extended the technique of A Portrait of Mabel Dodge to a series of portraits of objects, foods, and rooms, was the physical manifestation that forged the link into a chain. The Chicago Daily Tribune, for instance, dubbed Stein the “literary cubist,” the “high priestess” of modernism in its June 5, 1914 review of Tender Buttons (2:1). The Daily Tribune doesn’t review Stein’s work so much as quote it, with 3 paragraphs of review to 49 paragraphs of excerpt. We see here and in other reviews a repetition of 325 Blythe’s refusal to comment: Stein’s writing is seen as so extreme that no description, not even a parody, can compete with the work itself. Tender Buttons and the Modernist Crown Any high priestess has her detractors, and like modernism itself, Stein was frequently attacked. Stein’s association with various modernisms made her useful to those who wanted to damn them en masse, as did the author of “Tender Buttons, Curious Experiment of Gertrude Stein in Literary Anarchy” in the July 11, 1914 Boston Evening Transcript 23 : Boston has seen some of the paintings of Matisse and Picasso, the sculptures of Brancusi, which created such a stir of amazement and contempt last spring. It has heard too, perhaps, of the new symphonies, wild sounds produced on new and unmusical instruments, which originated lately in Italy. Boston has not tried to understand them, nor to admit that here is anything to understand, not even in the point of view of the perpetrators. So, in a way perhaps, these books which show the contemporary anarchy of art in the form of literature may serve as examples and explanations of the thing which has upset Paris and roused New York to a cynical interest. (Rogers 12) In other words, we don’t like Stein’s work anymore than the work of the other new artists, but because Stein traffics in words instead of sounds or images, she’s useful to us because it’s easier for us to say why we don’t like her work. Such reviews only increased Stein’s fame and notoriety, as bad publicity is still publicity. Consider “Officer, She’s Writing Again,” an anonymous, brief review of Tender Buttons in the June 6, 1914 Detroit News: Miss Gertrude Stein, who is at the head of the Cubists and Futurists in Paris, has produced Tender Buttons recently. The volume, according to one description, is a “sort of trilogy” on: “Objects,” “Foods” and “Rooms.” After reading excerpts from it a person feels like going out and pulling the Dime Bank building over himself. 24 326 (4) And after reading such a review, one was likely to remember Stein. Even those modernists who resented Stein’s ascension acknowledged how well Stein had caught the public eye. Among the literary modernists who found her unworthy was the poet and editor Alfred Kreymborg, a member of Alfred Steiglitz’s circle, and editor and publisher with Man Ray of the modernist periodical The Glebe, which published Ezra Pound’s important anthology Des Imagistes. Kreymborg’s article “Gertrude Stein—Hoax and Hoaxtress” explained to readers of the March 7, 1915 The Morning Telegraph why Stein was a pretender to the modernist throne. Kreymborg nonetheless concludes his article by acknowledging the power of Stein’s authorial persona and writing: Whether you wrinkle your brow and curl your tongue for a long, ponderous defense of her work, or whether you scowl and shoot your tongue for a venomous attack, or whether you merely lean back your velvet easy chair and open your mouth for a good roaring laugh, Miss Stein will have benefited you. She will have given you a new sensation. And sensations are so rare, particularly in these days of warfare that you don’t want to deny yourself the opportunity of one. You can always go back to sleep again (6). In other words, I, Alfred Kreymborg, know who deserves the miter of the modernist High Priestess—and Gertrude Stein should not wear that miter. Yet I cannot deny that she does wear that crown. Both her celebrity and her association with modernism are demonstrable facts. The backwash from all this celebrity flowed back to Three Lives (1909), which was reviewed in a modernist light by periodicals that ignored it upon its initial publication. For instance, the April 10, 1915, Philadelphia Public Ledger warns that “the blur which 327 this futurist in writing at first creates cannot be cleared until we are willing to bring the thought and intelligence to its interpretation which we needed when examining The Nude Descending the Stairs.” (Presumably, this thought and intelligence does not extend to the proper title of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase—an error that illustrates how the painting’s fame allowed it to be casually tossed off without fact-checking, and understood by the public even with the wrong title). We see here a logic where the mass public required a visual analogue to interpret the writing. After the Armory Show cemented Stein’s association with Modern art, such visual rubrics were frequently used to understand and judge Stein’s writing as well as her person, as if Stein herself were a work of modern art. Stein and Her Work as Objets d’Art A more rarified version of Stein’s visual spectacle was the phenomenon of Stein’s books themselves as objets d’art. As Stein’s persona was the focus of the mass public, rather than her work, so the material form of her work—which frequently incorporated drawings, lithographs, photographs, and other visual material—frequently superseded the content of her work in elite and highbrow culture. 25 A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia marks the first time that Stein’s interest in reproducing visual spectacle through the content of the text is echoed in her text’s material form. Though her first publication, Three Lives (1909) had a sober binding and dust jacket, A Portrait of Mabel Dodge (1912) was a pamphlet bound in wallpaper—in thirty-five different wallpapers, 328 Fig. 19: “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia,” Huntington Library. each a facsimile of a different multi-colored eighteenth-century floral Florentine design (fig. 19). The baroque, unconventional, and visually striking covering; the rarity of the limited edition of 300 stitched pamphlets; and the difficulty of a text without traditional mimesis all made A Portrait of Mabel Dodge a book easier to regard and exhibit than to read. Note how Blythe insists on the physicality of the book in “La Grande Fête Americaine”: “a small pamphlet with a gaudy cover of flowered paper” (11); “The pale young man lifted the little paper-covered book to his heart and kissed it reverently” (32); “he was clasping his little paper-covered book to his heart” (32); “I took the book, a slim 329 pamphlet of eleven printed pages” (32). While readers of the Saturday Evening Post might not understand the text, they did understand that it was—and caused—a spectacle. Tender Buttons, Stein’s next publication, was also visually spectacular (figs. 20, 21). The June 7, 1914 New York City Call, while reviewing Tender Buttons, is careful to note the material surface of this “slim little book bound in bright canary covers” and its publication by Claire Marie, a “publisher of books for people with exotic tastes” before panning its content. : Fig. 20: A faded, soiled, yet still canary yellow Tender Buttons, USC Library. Fig. 21: Circular labels in two shades of green. The following month, Robert E. Rogers in the July 11 Boston Evening Transcript leads an extended analysis of Tender Buttons with the volume’s provenance and material surface: There is in New York a new publishing company called simply the “Claire Marie,” which issues occasionally slender books bound in pale blues and greens, oranges and light lemons. The titles are, for instance, Sonnets from the Patagonian: The Street of Little Hotels, Saloon Sonnets and Sunday Flutings, Sacral Dimples and The Piety and Fans. These seem mad, but there is one that seems madder. It is Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein. 26 (3:12) 330 By citing these “mad” titles, Rogers here infers that Claire Marie publishes silly bibelots that are not to be taken seriously. Rogers proceeds to inform us that Claire Marie, presumably in its own words, wants to publish books for people who are tired of bestsellers and of the commonplace, who are eager for the sincerely exotic, the tomorrow of literature….[by authors] who have no wish to teach or to tear down, who are concerned only with the beauty of life. (3:12) Rogers informs readers of this aesthetic credo only to disagree with it, as he believes Tender Buttons, despite its apparently innocuous “light lemon” cover, to exemplify “anarchy in art” (12). In other words, Tender Buttons may look like an objet d’art, and its publisher may claim its products to be art pour l’art, but this volume of poetry is not ornamental. Instead, Tender Buttons poses great danger to aesthetics as we know them. Claire Marie’s reputation as a publisher of “mad” books worried Mabel Dodge, whose astute judgment of publicity, artistic clout, and literary cachet had put Stein in the public line of sight of the Armory Show. In a letter of March 29, 1914, Dodge offers Stein the following marketing analysis: Claire Marie...is absolutely third rate, & in bad odor here, being called for the most part “decadent" and Broadwayish and that sort of thing. . . . I think it would be a pity to publish with [Claire Marie] if it will emphasize the idea in the opinion of the public, that there is something degenerate & effete & decadent about the whole of the cubist movement which they all connect you with, because, hang it all, as long as they don't understand a thing they think all sorts of things. My feeling in this is quite strong. (Gallup 96) Dodge observes that Claire Marie will position Tender Buttons as less valuable than Dodge would like, which will in turn decrease not only Stein’s market value but also that of all the cubists. Stein’s choice may well bring down the value of the entire brand of Modern art, which will henceforth be received as “Broadwayish.” As the mass public 331 very much supported Broadway, Dodge’s “public,” in fact, references those who both support the fine arts and look down on Broadway as a place of tawdry art beneath their notice. 27 Here I’d like to make an analogy that may seem frivolous but is very much to Dodge’s point. Say that Stein were a couturier of a particular stripe, one of a number of dressmakers seeking to set a trend in hobble skirts, which were popular from 1910 to 1913. Claire Marie is willing to produce Stein’s designs, but Claire Marie is also a house that doesn’t serve clients of the highest caliber. Broadway stars—degenerate, effete, and decadent Broadway stars—patronize Claire Marie, and their patronage ensures that Dodge’s upper-class, snobbish “public” would never view Stein in particular, and the bustle in general, as chic again. Dodge’s public follows fashion without understanding fashion—and so no matter how exquisite Stein’s future dresses may be, an air of the “Broadwayish” will taint them. Stein nonetheless published with Claire Marie, almost certainly because the publisher, the poet Donald Evans, offered Stein her first opportunity to see her work in print without subsidizing it. He even offered Stein for royalties: “10% on the first 500 copies sold and 15% on all after that” (Gallup 96). In the decades that followed, however, Stein followed Dodge’s advice—not by choice, but because only presses on the bleeding edge were willing to publish her. Intentionally or not, Stein kept her cachet high and her audience exclusive by publishing with presses that, though may have been “degenerate & effete & decadent,” were certainly not “Broadwayish.” 28 332 Stein’s publishers further rarified her product by frequently authorizing “deluxe,” more visually appealing, and more expensive limited editions. The publishers did this even when the standard edition of Stein’s work was visually notable and published in an extremely small run. For instance, while all 102 copies of the first edition of A Book Concluding with As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story (1926) had lithographs by the cubist Juan Gris, only the ten copies of the deluxe edition were signed by the author and artist and printed on Japon ancien vellum. Vellum is the high-quality parchment made of calf skin used in medieval manuscripts; Japanese vellum is a thick, smooth, glossy, durable paper suitable for engravings, produced from plant fibers of an unusually great length; and Japon ancien vellum is paper treated with hydrochloric acid to resemble Japanese vellum. Despite these two degrees of separation from actual vellum, Japon ancien is a very fine paper, and its use does appreciably change the material experience of reading Stein’s texts and Gris’ lithographs. The autographs, however, only serve as material traces of the writer and artists; they raise the value of the deluxe edition only because of their scarcity, and because the cultural cachet of Stein and Gris transfers to those who hold a relic of their body as well as their mind. The rarity, cost, and visuality of these deluxe editions, as well as Stein’s notoriety and avant-garde pedigree, broadcast intellectual and artistic cachet and cultural capital to and from those who had no interest in actually reading Stein. For example, five copies of The Making of Americans (1925) were printed in Japanese vellum and lettered in gold on the cover. The use value of these copies came from the broadcast of their owners’ wealth and taste. Whether these five copies were read was incidental, and even inimical, to their 333 value, as the heavy handling necessary to read almost a thousand difficult pages would almost certainly decrease the value of this investment and display. Stein’s books, in other words, were frequently produced and consumed as objets d’art. The book as an object was more valuable than the book’s contents—and as suited the stratospherically high culture where Stein’s work circulated, her work was often produced with extraordinarily rarified gradations of value. Before the success of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933), the variegation of Stein’s deluxe editions was taken to its largest extreme with the French-English Dix Portraits (1930), which was clearly both produced and bought with its value as a collectible in mind. Note the similarity between the description of the varieties of Dix Portraits below and the ad copy of a contemporary luxury catalog that assures its readers that its products are indeed exclusive, and of the highest quality. Note also that there was no Gertrude Stein mailing list, and that only those who bought deluxe editions of avant-garde art were likely to be contacted by the publisher. Otherwise, potential consumers had to hear about these offerings from a sufficiently well-connected person. Note as well that potential consumers had to be a part of the tiny subculture of rich people interested not only in avant-garde art but also in avant avant-garde art, as Stein frequently had trouble publishing even in small, literary magazines and journals. The exclusivity of this population, both knowledgeable enough to know of the editions and rich enough to afford them, is breathtaking. The first edition of Dix Portraits has ten tissue-guarded illustration plates by a stunning array of the greatest lights of the avant-garde: the great modernist Pablo Picasso, the Russian émigré artist Pavlik Tchelitchev, the Dutch painter Kristians Tonny, the Neo-Romantic artist and designer Christian “Bébé” Berard, and as a 334 special treat, two composers working in a new medium: the eccentric rebel Erik Satie and the promising young American Virgil Thomson. All copies of the first edition are signed by Stein as well as her translators, Thompson and the poet Georges Hugnet, who together render her word portraits from English into French in this bilingual first edition. Three different varieties of the first edition are available: 65 on vélin d’Arches paper (125 francs), 25 on the more expensive Hollande van Gelder paper (300 francs), and the 10 most expensive on Imperial Japon vellum, with part of the text copied out in Stein’s own hand (500 francs). 29 By contrast, the 400 copies of the first trade edition of Dix Portraits, for sale at 50 francs and also published in 1930, had no illustrations whatsoever and was not signed. Possible revenue from the trade edition was 20,000 francs vs. 20,625 francs from the deluxe editions. Advantage deluxe—an advantaged heightened by the fact that the trade edition itself didn’t appeal to the public, but either to an audience who either had a sincere interest in difficult experimental contemporary literature (never large) or to an audience who wanted something that embodied intellectual acumen and exquisite taste (somewhat larger)—something with a piece of Stein’s cachet. For non-French buyers, this cachet was heightened by the necessity of paying for the book in francs, as French exports tend to accumulate value outside of France, due to importing costs and the high-culture, avant- garde mystique that easily attaches to French artifacts outside France. The advertising copy for Dix Portraits therefore offers not only an impressive amount and varieties of proof of the volume’s value as an objet d’art, but also substantive proof of its potential owners’ income and taste. Stein’s cachet would not have been able to justify such luxury purchases if it weren’t for the Armory Show, which permanently welded visual spectacle to Stein’s authorial persona, and gave this persona dominance over her work itself. This spectacle has three foci for the mass public: (1) Stein’s own looks, as translated into her authorial 335 persona, as seen in “A Zolaesque American”; (2) Stein’s rendering of visual aesthetics into literature, as seen in her word portraits and “Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose,” and (3) Stein’s personal association with the modernists specifically, and outrageous bohemia at large, as seen in all the above, as well as “La Grande Fête Americaine.” Stein’s association with the modernists also offered an intellectual rationalization for interpreting her visually, which justified and further strengthened the visceral tendency to interpret her visually. A more rarified version of Stein’s visual spectacle was seen in the phenomenon of Stein’s work being itself understood as objects of spectacle as much as if not more than as forms of literature. In short, Stein was configured as a celebrity and a visual spectacle more than she was an author, and her work was consumed as such. And as a celebrity and a visual spectacle, Stein was success. As an author, however, she lacked a reading public. Stein in Life and Vanity Fair, 1917-1919 On December 27, 1917, Life published “Relief Work in France,” a short poem by Gertrude Stein. The magazine published another of Stein’s poems, “A League,” two years later on September 19, 1919. Though they are little known today, these two poems were the most widely published works by Stein for the first twenty years of her career. Uncharacteristically, Stein’s poems in Life were not broadly queer either in content or context. In fact, the Life poems of 1917 and 1919 are one of the very few times when Stein’s work appears in the popular press as literature to be judged on its own merit. The 336 poems are neither subordinated to Stein’s public persona nor positioned as avant-garde— and as avant-garde, interesting because of their departure from the artistic mainstream. The Life poems, by contrast, are presented primarily as reflections on current events. Even in 1919, when the editors have some reservations about Stein’s work, those reservations are primarily due to the content of the poem, not the content’s form or the poet’s reputation. If it weren’t for these poems’ status as Stein’s most available and most read work until 1933, I would view them as a one-off, a random glitch, and ignore them. If I did so, I would not be alone. The lack of any contemporary scandal, outrage, or literary chatter concerning the Life poems has helped keep them from critical consideration, and has contributed to their poor showing in anthologies of Stein’s work. 30 The only critical analysis of the Life poems that I have found is by Margaret Dickey, who does not consider their importance as Stein’s most-circulated work before 1933. By and large, current critics and readers expect Stein’s poetry, especially during her lifetime, to have had an extremely limited and sophisticated audience who read and publish her for her technique rather than for her reportage. Yet the Life poems are recognizable as Stein’s work, are readily comprehensible meditations on current events, are accessible to the general reader, and do not stand out from the other contents of the magazine. In terms of Stein’s career, the Life poems are so strange that despite their historical prominence, they fall beyond the critical pale. “Relief Work in France” and to a lesser extent, “A League” therefore offer a glimpse of an alternate career trajectory for Stein, one where her broadly-queer notoriety doesn’t precede and shape the reception of her work, and where the work itself is not 337 queer in terms of either form or content. These two poems are not only the most read works of the first two decades of Stein’s career but also what comprised her corpus for the vast majority of her early readers, though probably not those who configured the literary elite. In other words, they are respectable—and Stein’s respectability is essential to the popularity of the Autobiography. Without respectability, Stein’s broad queerness would not have been able to make her memoir of a longstanding lesbian domestic partnership, complete with photographs of her and Toklas en ménage, celebrated by thousands of homophobic Americans. In this section, I analyze Stein’s poems in the context of the December 27, 1917 and September 19, 1919 issues of Life, and prove how, despite ample opportunity to present Stein as broadly queer, the magazine presents her as respectable. I also place the Life poems in the context of Stein’s reputation as an eccentric in the aftermath of the Armory Show, and offer them as a corrective to this eccentricity. Last, I compare the Life poems to Stein’s concurrent appearances in Vanity Fair, to consider further iterations of her broad queerness, her specific homosexuality, and her newfound respectability—all three of which were indexed by her role as an ambulance driver in World War I, one of the key notes of Stein’s legend today. The importance of the Life poems works to Stein’s history as a writer who was read, rather than a celebrity who was known, cannot be understated. In the first two decades of her career, Stein’s major publications were Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), and Geography and Plays (1922). Stein had to subsidize the initial print run of Three Lives: 1,000 manuscript sheets, 500 of which were bound. These 500 copies 338 took more than a decade to sell out, and the remaining copies weren’t bound until 1920. Though Stein didn’t have to pay to publish Tender Buttons, she didn’t profit from it either. The poems had a print run of only 1,000 and weren’t reprinted for more than fifty years. Stein’s sales actually declined with Geography and Plays (1922), which earned Stein her worst sales and reviews yet. 13 years after Three Lives, Stein was still paying vanity presses to publish her work—and demand for the 2500 printed copies of Geography and Plays was so slight that the last batch of manuscript sheets wasn’t even bound for 18 years. By comparison, Life had 250,000 readers in 1920. “Relief Work in France” and “A League” had a readership greater by a factor of 83 than that of Stein’s first three major books combined. Life is not LIFE, the photojournalism magazine founded by Henry Luce that ran weekly from 1938 to 1972. 31 Instead, Life was an influential weekly (1883-1930) that took its cue from Punch as it satirized American society. Though editor and artist John Ames Mitchell founded Life to offer a public forum for black-and-white drawing, the magazine soon became known for defenses of common decency and the common interest, and for attacks on indecency, Prohibition, “politics as usual,” and publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst. 32 Life’s targets, especially Hearst, frequently sued, and these court cases raised the magazine’s profile as an advocate for the public interest, which in turn helped shift the humor magazine’s reputation from “indecent” to “appropriate for middle-class homes.” A contemporary analogue in form if not audience or content to Life is the New Yorker, which copies Life’s format in its “Talk of the Town”: a collection of short anecdotes, both visual and written, some signed and some 339 not, which serve both editorial and op-ed purposes, and which are piquant, satiric, absurd, or straightforwardly political. Like today’s New Yorker, Life also included highly rendered black-and-white drawings and cartoons; theater and cinema reviews; and pin-up girls, including the iconic Gibson Girl, who made her debut in Life (fig. 22). Stein was not a natural fit for Life except as a figure of fun. She certainly was no Gibson Girl. The Gibson Girl’s reign began to decline with the Armory Show and the Fig. 22: Gibson Girl, Richard Henry Dana Fig. 23: Stein in Medical School. Beinecke Library. resulting fascination with modernity, and she was effectively dead as an ideal by the end of World War I. Nonetheless, until the rise of the Coco Chanel suit after the war, the Gibson Girl remained the most easily available image of female glamour. (Note, for instance, how the women are figured in December 27, 1917 issue of Life. The woman in fig. 24 is distinctly Gibson-esque, while the women in fig. 25 look towards the 1920s.) In 340 Gibson’s drawings, she is self-possessed, slightly mischievous, and at ease with men. Though Stein was all three, she was no Gibson girl—but she could have approached the ideal, had she chosen. A photo of the Stein in her early twenties (fig. 23) is jarring precisely because it contradicts her public persona, which since its birth in the 1910 “A Zolaesque American,” had been antithetical to the Gibson Girl or any other form of hegemonic femininity and beauty present in the 20 th century. Yet Life offered Stein not only her biggest but also her most conventional and respectable outlet. In the December 27, 1917, issue of Life, Stein is not configured as queer. She’s just another contributor, writing in support of the war effort. How was this possible, in the light of Stein’s widespread, eccentric reputation? In The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, Stein states that she was published in Life because of a clever letter she wrote to the editor after reading parodies of herself in the magazine: Gertrude Stein suddenly one day wrote a letter to Masson who was the editor of Life and said to him that the real Gertrude Stein was…funnier in every way than the imitations, not to say much more interesting, and why did they not print the original. 33 To her astonishment she received a very nice letter from Mr. Masson saying that he would be glad to do so. And they did. (171, my ellipsis) This story corroborates that Stein’s persona had already taken hold in Life, and sheds light on Stein’s consciousness of her public image and her desire to be widely read. (The story also proves that the editors of Life were at least in this case good sports were open to suggestion and correction.) As Life did not publish Stein’s letter, the correspondence was invisible to its readers. The only overt editorial positioning of Stein is the following parenthesis after the poem’s title: “Miss Gertrude Stein sends us this contribution from Paris, and it has been set in the style of type in which Miss Stein’s verses usually 341 appear.—Editor of Life” (1076). The poem is set in Stein’s small caps, which stand out on the pages of Life. This editor positions Stein as a credible war reporter, as she sends the poem from Paris, and the careful delineation of her usual font communicates (1) that she has a body of work that (2) is worthy of special type. Stein registers as special, but her specialness in this case is not, as it will be consistently throughout her career, coeval with either ridicule or deification. Stein is respectable in the December 27, 1917 issue of Life not only because of her editorial positioning but also because of the content and form of “Relief Work in France,” which in the context of Life is entirely proper. The poem opens five windows upon its subject in five irregular stanzas (1076). Here are the first two, as indented in Life: THE ADVANCE IN COMING TO A VILLAGE WE ASK THEM CAN THEY COME TO SEE US. WE MEAN NEAR ENOUGH TO TALK; AND THEN WE ASK THEM HOW DO WE GO THERE, THIS IS NOT FANCIFUL. MONDAY AND TUESDAY IN THE MEANTIME WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT WISHES? WISH THE SAME. AGREED FOR A MINOR AND FOR MY NIECE. WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOR MY NIECE? BABY CLOTHES. AND MILK. MALTED MILK. The poem offers a fairly lucid mimesis of the perils of relief work. The first stanza suggests the complex transactions necessary to approach strangers in wartime, and the second offers the overlapping voices and thoughts of the aid workers and the villagers during the lag between specific requests for aid and their fulfillment. Only “agreed for a 342 minor” doesn’t easily unlock. Other verses are less transparent, but relief work can always be discerned. And while a contemporary intimate of Stein or a current reader armed with Stein biographies can unlock the specifics of each stanza with the history of Stein and Toklas’s war volunteering and therefore find a testament to the closeness of the women’s relations, such interpretations were unavailable to readers of Life, who lacked the context to read such same-sexual erotics. Contemporary “common readers” would find “Relief Work in France” neither particularly difficult nor especially avant-garde in the context of the magazine. The issue’s first article, “——Less Days in Germany,” sets the subject of war and the tone of wordplay that continues through the rest of the issue, including “Relief Work in France.” Furthermore, like many of the brief pieces in Life, “——Less Days in Germany” is unsigned, which puts in the editorial voice, and backs it with the editor’s imprimatur. Though “——Less Days” is not explicitly labeled as poetry, it nonetheless neatly parallels “Relief Work” as a series of fragmented stanzas loosely structured around the war (1073). In fact, “——Less Days” in some respects is less traditional than Stein’s poem, with more nonce words and a less traditional syntax. Instead, a series of words that loosely connote the war, often with more than one meaning, are made coeval by the constant addition of the suffix “less” and organized into seven lines of comparable length, headed by, but with only occasional relation to, the seven days of the week. MONDAY. Tasteless, friendless, virtueless, beerless, jestless, wasteless, thankless, provisionless. TUESDAY. Victoryless, butterless, shoeless, heartless, soupless, matchless, cigarless, peaceless, dietless. WEDNESDAY. Bankless, hapless, faithless, fishless, flourless, regardless, pipeless, warmthless, rationless. 343 THURSDAY. Kulturless, fortuneless, consciousless, breakfastless, supperless, joyless, pitiless. FRIDAY. Comfortless, powerless, truthless, meatless, respiteless, slumberless, eggless, eatless, drinkless. SATURDAY. Helpless, financeless, cheerless, virtueless, colorless, breadless, banquetless, lawless, masticationless. SUNDAY. Gottless, honorless, neverless, restless, hopeless, crueless, endless, nutrimentless, lifeless. (1073) Once the textual gimmick of “–––Less Days” is understood, it’s not hard to parse, while “Relief Work” remains unstable and ambiguous, and thus more challenging in terms of form. “–––Less Days” is more politically challenging, however, as German words such as “Gott” and “kultur,” as well as “beer,” which was inaccurately believed to be the quintessential German beverage in the United States, suggest that the poem is from the perspective of the German troops. Though the Germans are “honorless” and “lawless,” they are also “helpless,” “hopeless” “nutrimentless,” and finally “lifeless.” The poem is therefore somewhat sympathetic to the Germans—or, at least, humanizes them—which is surprising for a lead article in Life, which, like most leading U. S. magazines by 1919, usually dehumanizes Germans. In short, “Relief Work” is decidedly approachable in the context of “––––Less Days.” The December 27, 1917 issue of Life itself is extremely varied, with an impressive variety of medium, genre, and attitude. In the context of this carnival multiplicity, Stein is the norm (fig. 24). After “Relief Work in France” comes the unsigned article “Locating the Germans,” an inspissated parody of anti-ethnic hysteria, so precisely calibrated that it is impossible to state what is being satirized except for the location of ethnicity itself. Next comes the anonymously authored “Wanted: Safe- 344 Fig. 24: Lay-out of Life pages with “Relief Work in France.” Fig. 25: “Package.” 345 Fig. 26: The Willowby’s Ward: “Molly and Mrs. Willowby Return in Time to Rescue the Professor from a Wily Book Agent” Keeping for Bonds,” a radical shift in tone and an earnest plea for a “special, country- wide provision for safe-keeping of [liberty] bonds for small investors” (1075). (Anonymous contributions are more common than signed ones in Life, as they were in its offshoot, the New Yorker, until the 1990s.) The drawings in the issue are as numerous and varied as the written contributions, both in terms of form and content. “Relief Work in France” is cater-corner from a one-panel, cartoony, visual joke where a suitor jumps back in horror and drops his candy as “She”—pardon me a minute while I open this package from Walter—reveals the pointed Prussian helmet her solider boyfriend has sent her, conflating the suitor’s fear of a killer fiancé with his own shame at not fighting the war (fig. 25). This cartoon is itself cater-corner, across the binding edge of the facing page, from the 31 st installment of E. Forster Lincoln’s absurdist serial The Willowby’s 346 Ward, the humor of which is anchored by the conflict between the absurd goings-on and the naturalist, almost-photographic combination of drawing and wash (fig. 26). As “Locating the Germans” reminds us as it mocks both vigilance and lassitude, “It is astonishing what new arts one has to practice during wartime” (1075). Stein’s poem may be unspectacular in the context of Life, but Stein herself is not a natural fit for Life except as a figure of fun. Life’s respectful treatment of Stein as a woman and as a writer is particularly strange as the magazine is riddled with binaries that position Stein as abnormal, ugly, and broadly queer. A close examination of the issue’s contents shows Stein consistently on the losing side of binaries of attractive vs. unattractive female features, body size, and costume; of appropriate vs. inappropriate female economic, marital, and romantic status and behavior; of desirable vs. undesirable ethnic and national identity; and of respectable vs. disreputable social circles and behavior. Elements of Stein’s persona that were first seen in the February 13, 1910 New York Press, and that had been heavily featured in her press coverage since, are surprisingly absent in the December 27, 1917 Life. Life does not reference Stein’s large body in masculine dress; her Jewishness; her bohemian, expatriate circle and air; or her avant-garde work, all of which, along with her public relationship with Toklas, would come to mark her as broadly queer and, to a particular audience, as specifically lesbian. Yet Life consistently installs the binaries that consistently label Stein elsewhere as queer. For instance, two pages before Stein’s “Relief Work in France,” Life offers a humorous article, a list entitled “Things You Never Hear About” (1074). Such unheard phenomena includes “A magazine lacking at least one story with a blue-eyed, golden- 347 haired heroine, who weighs one hundred and five pounds or less” as well as “Any good being accomplished by suffragettes picketing the White House” (1074). We see here how thorough Life is in its dismissal of women. First, Life mocks the contemporary exemplary heroine as a thin Anglo-Saxon whose heroism is defined by her ornamental value. The editors both mock the literary cliché and imply that such women aren’t heroic but frivolous, and clichéd in the details of their frivolity as well as their “heroism.” Yet Life also claims that female heroism in terms of direct political action is also fruitless, per the Suffragettes. Stein, who was determinedly not thin, blonde, or Anglo-Saxon, and who would come to be hero of the feminist movement through her economic and artistic independence, her aggressive claiming of her own genius, and her embodiment in both her person and writing of a non-hegemonic, non-heterosexual erotics, is certainly one of those “Things You Never Hear About.” A third thing you never hear about—“Anybody offering a position of trust and responsibility to the I.W.W”—references Stein’s ethnicity, though statistically Jews were neither a large fraction of the International Workers of the World nor had influence among the Wobblies. The public imagination, however, was riveted by I.W.W. figurehead Emma Goldman, “Red Emma,” who helped fix the public association between Jews, the I.W.W. in particular, and the radical Left in general that remained through most of the century (figs. 27, 28). 348 Fig. 27: Frontispiece of Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays, 1910. Fig. 28: Official deportation photo of the “Russian Jewish Anarchist,” 1919. Both the extent of Goldman’s celebrity and the association between Jews and the IWW can be seen in “The Marvelous Event” by Kenneth L. Roberts, a satire in the December 27, 1917 issue of Life. The epigraph to “The Marvelous Event” is a prophecy of a worker’s revolution by Goldman: “We have Bolshviki in America. Woe to America if we did not have them. The 349 same marvelous event that came in Russia is as sure to come in America as the day follows the night” (1075). The satire dramatizes the inaugural conference between new Secretary of State Falloff Jumpupsky and new President Dimitri Sassonovitch, “one of the most accomplished garment-cutters that ever blocked traffic on Hester Street” (1078). Outside the Oval Office, “Pennsylvania Avenue was packed with cheering Bolsheviki, whose vociferous huzzas were interspersed with victorious shrieks of Oi yoi yoi!” (1075). The Semitic connotations—the oi, the garment-cutter on Hester Street, the parodic names—are clear, as is the relevance to Stein. It’s useful to compare the publication history of Emma Goldman and Gertrude Stein: the former an anarchist and assassin, the other a revolutionary of lesbian representation, in both her art and her person. Goldman (1869-1940) was a close contemporary of Stein (1874-1946). Both were Jewish, physically large, expatriate woman writers and iconic rebels who were determinedly non-hegemonic in both their writing and their public persona. Though Goldman usually wore “female” clothes, and therefore didn’t break the conventions of female public presentation as much as Stein, she was still a departure from “the blue-eyed, golden-haired heroine, who weighs one hundred and five pounds or less” referenced by “Things You Never Hear About” (1074). Though the women never met, both were American expatriates, both of whom lived in France in the 1920s. Both were part of a supportive community of like-minded writers and artists; both initially published with what were essentially vanity presses; both gave notorious lecture tours; both wrote bestselling biographies in middle age. Nonetheless, Goldman had a easier time getting into (non-self-subsidized) print, and did better in the 350 marketplace—proof that even blunt calls to anarchy were more publishable than direct representations of lesbian identity. Goldman’s first publication (with Johan Most) was “Anarchy Defended by Anarchists” in the October 1896 Metropolitan Magazine. In 1906, she founded the monthly journal Mother Earth with her domestic partner, Alexander Berkman. Mother Earth became a forum for her own essays, some of which first appeared in periodicals with a broader readership, such as the New York World. Goldman’s work was collected in Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), also published by Mother Earth. All this activity brought her notoriety, celebrity, and the public persona of “Red Emma.” By contrast, Stein never did find a publishing outlet for her first two novels, Q.E.D. and Fernhurst, and in fact specified that they were not to be published until after her death. Even accounting for Goldman’s five years’ seniority over Stein, Stein published later, to less attention, and only after having abandoned realist representation for occult techniques that drew attention to how rather than what she wrote. Furthermore, Stein’s own celebrity and notoriety was, unlike Goldman’s, not initially tied to her subject, but rather to the broader queerness of modernism. Nonetheless, the correspondences between these writers are strong enough for us to reasonably expect that a magazine that mocked Goldman would also mock Stein. Yet Stein’s persona does not take root in Life’s field of gendered, ethnic signification. Stein’s next publication in Life, five years later on September 18, 1919, is a poetic reflection on the League of Nations. The League was proposed in January of 1919, and with the strong support of Woodrow Wilson, was established in concert with the formal 351 close of World War I at the Treaty of Versailles on June 28 of that year. The editors frame Stein less sympathetically than they did in 1917 but still do not reinstall her queer persona. Stein’s poem “A League” is accompanied by a waspish editor’s note: “Miss Gertrude Stein is one of the pioneers of Free Verse. We gladly publish her poem as a fit accompaniment to President Wilson’s elucidation of the League of Nations— EDITOR OF LIFE” (496). Wilson’s “elucidation of the League” references the president’s difficulty (and later, failure) in persuading Congress to ratify entry. Life was not in general support of the League, and the editor’s snide reference to Wilson is an unsympathetic setting for Stein and her work. The editor positions “A League” as a joke: an unwitting satire upon Wilson, and a ridiculous example of ridiculous Free Verse, a term that first earned public currency four years before, in the preface to the first Imagist anthology, Des Imagistes (1910). 34 The difficulty and fragmentation of Stein’s “A League” does not suit Life as well as “Relief Work in France,” and in that sense, the editor’s introduction suits the poem. “A League” reads in full as follows: Why don’t you visit your brother with a girl he doesn’t know? And in the midst of emigration we have wishes to bestow. We gather that the West is wet and fully ready to flow. And we father that the East is wet and very ready to say so. We gather that we wonder, and we gather that it is in respect to all of us that we think. Let us stray. Do you want a baby? A round one or a pink one? (496) The poem personifies, sexualizes, and urges on the creation of the League of Nations. The first line of “A League” calls for social, probably romantic, mixing outside one’s circle, possibly the introduction of a potential fiancée to one’s family. This possibility is 352 heightened by the line’s syntax—the repeated negative, the question with the rising inflection—which indicates a Yiddish accent. The line’s accent and content implies an interfering Jewish mother, here uncharacteristically asking for relations outside the tribe. This call for exogamy is transposed to an international key by the title “A League” and the next line’s “wishes,” presumably “good wishes,” bestowed for such mixing by the narrator as she, or perhaps the mixers, “emigrate.” Note that “best wishes” was the polite congratulation to a new bride for much of the twentieth century, as “congratulations” implied that a bride had actively promoted engagement, rather than passively waited to be chosen, as was appropriate. Grooms were congratulated, while brides received “best wishes.” Note also that “emigration” is an accurate metaphor for a woman in a patriarchal society who leaves her father’s house for her husband’s. The encomium continues with an embodied, female same-sexualization of West and East, both of whom are “wet.” The narrator “gathers,” or compiles information from various sources, that that the West is “fully ready to flow”—she intuits/learns/knows not only the Western woman’s arousal but also her anticipation of arousal. The plural narrator also “fathers” that the East is not only “ready” and “wet,” but also vocal about her readiness for an international sexualized congress. Stein sometimes referenced her Jewishness as “oriental,” or Eastern, which perhaps explains how the narrator “fathers” (somehow inseminates, is genetically related to) the East’s availability for mixing—a knowledge that the narrator is “very ready to say” in the pages of Life magazine. 35 Can “A League” therefore be read as yet another page of the palimpsest Stein created from her affair with May Bookstaver? Did Stein “visit her brother” Leo with her 353 shiksa girlfriend May, “someone he doesn’t know?” The poem is not such strict or simple biography. Stein introduced Toklas not Bookstaver to Leo, and Alice was as “Oriental” as Gertrude herself. Biography aside, Stein’s call for a community of nations introduces its climax with “Let us stray”—a profane, sexualized rewriting of “Let us pray”—and extends this climax with a proffer of sexual reproduction: “Do you want a baby?” This question, which at first works against my reading of the poem as a national anthem of the Lesbian League, is queered by the end of the climactic line: “A round one or a pink one?” These two choices—round or pink, a particular shape or particular color—are not in the same order of things, and as such, put categorization itself in doubt. 36 In the context of a poem that promotes promiscuous national blending, this disordering disrupts the poem’s two scales of ordering—sexuality and ethnicity—to throw the reader into a same- sexualized blend that fertilizes unusual fruit. “A League,” like Three Lives, is therefore intimately lesbian in content, if not necessarily obviously and invariably so. Like the novel, the poem manages to state its lesbian terms in the public ear without being publicly censored or understood. To the readers of Life, Stein is an occasional political poet whose queerness is textual rather than sexual, and not extreme. As such, Stein is similar to other lesbian and bisexual women writers of her time who created art concerned with and formed by same-sexuality that was nonetheless and necessarily closeted in public, but whose textual queerness offered a trail of breadcrumbs that, if properly followed, led to a lesbian door. The cover of the September 19, 1919 issue of Life that included “A League” illustrates the poem’s trick of appearing respectable but actually presenting images of 354 homosexual desire. In “Johnny Comes Marching Home,” General John J. Pershing stands in an open car as he is driven into the lower left corner of the image (fig. 29). The open Fig. 29: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” cover of Life, 18 September 1919. car indicates that war is over, and the westward travel indicates that Pershing is coming home, which fits with the publication date of the magazine. Pershing, who held the highest rank ever awarded to a living soldier in the United States Army—General of the Armies—salutes the only other soldier of this rank, George Washington, who received it posthumously, and watches Pershing from heaven on horseback. Washington salutes 355 Pershing by tipping his hat. Riding next to Washington is the leading Union general, Ulysses S. Grant, who also salutes.The face of the fourth figure—Pershing’s driver—is turned further away from the viewer than the generals, and presumably serves the purpose of dramatizing Pershing’s command and giving him the opportunity to stand. The cover links the victorious American past with the victorious American present through generals who congratulate each other on jobs and wars well won. In terms of easily available meanings, it’s difficult to imagine an image more supportive of the ruling hegemony. Yet “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” also contains less conventional elements. As in the May 20, 1916 Norman Rockwell cover of the Saturday Evening Post, three men discuss masculinity and, at first glance, affirm the status quo. They have won the war, they have proven their manhood, and now they are going home. But to what? The cover illustration offers an entirely masculine circuit of affection and emotion where men riding around on powerful phalluses congratulate each other on their prowess. (Note that both horses and car project firmly from the generals’ legs.) What can be found in heaven? Male couples who eternally celebrate their potency as they ride around in military uniforms. Male coupling is, in fact, the primary visual motif of the illustration. Generals Washington and Grant are visually matched, as are their horses, as are General Pershing and his driver. In addition, the couple of Washington and Grant are twinned with the couple of Pershing and his driver. The set-up could be easily co-opted by Tom of Finland. “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” not only has homosexual themes in 356 common with “A League,” but also shares the poem’s surrealism. The first work of literary surrealism—Les Chants Magnétiques, or The Magnetic Fields—was written in 1919 (pub. 1920) by André Breton and Phillipe Soupault, who with Louis Aragon founded the journal Littérature. Like the Dadaists, whom they grew out of, the Surrealists blamed the destruction of World War I on the overweening rationality of the nineteenth century. Broadly speaking, the Surrealists embraced the free association promulgated by the Dadaists (and Freud, their other important influence) while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness or darkness of the mind. Unlike the Dadaists, the Surrealists created new works rather than responding to the old, in part because they wanted to create new, positive values and social structures that weren’t beholden to rationality. Both Les Chants Magnétiques and Littérature shared the embrace of the irrational and the championing of mental associations unencumbered by physical possibility that we see in When Johnny Came Marching Home. Only a far stretch of the imagination could associate the generals with the communism and anarchism that the Surrealists embraced as part of their project to overcome the status quo. The Surrealists weren’t fully codified as a movement until Bréton’s 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism,” and I do not claim a direct correspondence between the cover of the September 19, 1919 Life magazine and Surrealism. Yet both the generals’ homoerotic ménage à trois and the comparative brightness and vividity of the dead couple over the sober grey of Pershing and his driver fulfill the surrealist goal of freeing people from rationality and championing the omnipotence of dream. Both the illustration and the movement respond to World War I in strikingly similar ways. 357 Stein had one other mass-market outlet besides Life during World War I: Vanity Fair, which published the poems “Have They Attacked Mary. He Giggled” (June 1917); “The Great American Army” (June 1918); and “A Deserter,” “The Meaning of the Bird,” “J.R.” and “J.R. II” (all March 1919). The early-twentieth-century Vanity Fair never had a larger circulation than 90,000, less than half of that of Life. To use anachronistic terms, Life was middlebrow while Vanity Fair was highbrow. Its readers were composed of the cultural elite and those who aspired to the cultural elite, both of whom were likely to strongly associate Stein with the Armory Show and with the salon she had held since 1903 for artists, writers, and tourists at 27 Rue de Fleurus. In fact, it seems fair to say that the demographic of Vanity Fair could in large part be described as those who wanted to go to 27 Rue de Fleurus and meet Miss Stein and the fabulous artists. Unsurprisingly, Vanity Fair usually positioned Stein’s work in the vanguard of the avant-garde, and presented Stein, like the magazine itself, as being at an angle, a superior angle, to mainstream culture. Stein’s appearances in Vanity Fair allow us to consider the variety of ways that her broad queerness, her specific homosexuality, and her newfound respectability intermingled in her public persona. Vanity Fair also allows us to consider how all three aspects of Stein’s persona were indexed by her rle as an ambulance driver in World War I, one of the key notes of Stein’s legend today. In the summer of 1917, as the Battle of Verdun waned and the Battle of the Somme waxed, Stein, who had recently returned to Paris from Mallorca with Toklas, observed a young woman in uniform who worked for the American Fund for French Wounded. For Stein (if not necessarily her persona), patriotism was complicated by her 358 identification with France, where she spent most of her adult life; in life if not words, she repudiated the United States. Happily, the American Fund for French Wounded allowed her to serve both masters. Stein and Toklas became volunteers for the organization and delivered supplies to French hospitals until the 1918 Armistice. (“Relief Work in France” is the narrative of one of their trips.) Stein drove an “ambulance” insofar as she delivered medical supplies; she didn’t drive the wounded. Margaret Dickey writes that, as an ambulance driver, Stein’s “war experience was considered so unusual that she was able to publish war poetry in such popular magazines as Life and Vanity Fair at a time when she was having great difficulty in placing her work in avant-garde journals” (40). Here, Dickey makes an intuitive leap from accepted wisdom—a leap that misses the mark. While Dickey is correct that Stein’s work was too experimental for little journals and magazines, her claim that Stein’s volunteer work made her more marketable is questionable. Stein’s ambulance driving is always heavily stressed in her biographies and autobiographies, and is an active part of her public persona today. The story is appealing. Stein and Toklas’s volunteer work is heroic and usual, and several of the details are funny, such as Stein’s dislike of reverse gear, her poor sense of direction, and the names of her cars: Auntie and Godiva. Similarly, Stein’s close relations with a number of American GIs are appealing, interesting, inspire her prose piece Brewsie and Willy (1946), and are heavily featured in her biographies and autobiographies, especially Wars I Have Seen (1945). Nonetheless, it’s not at all clear how well known Stein’s volunteer 359 work was during the war. As we have seen, it’s not mentioned in Life. Nor is it certain that if her volunteer work were commonly known, it would be considered broadly queer. Wars that involve a large part of society always strain a gendered division of labor, and Stein and Toklas were not in any way alone in terms of war service. The American Fund for French Wounded was run by a woman: Mrs. Isabel Winthrop, who when Stein and Toklas met her was wearing “a pink dress with pearls and a garden party hat” (Mellow 226). Furthermore, as discussed in Chapter 1, women who perform “male” activity tended to experience less hostility in the twentieth-century United States than men who performed “female” activity, if the women weren’t viewed as threatening male privilege. Last, the U. S. government promoted an enormous public relations effort to convince women to serve in the war effort and take up the professions of men who were serving. Part of this marketing blitz was reassurance that serving in the armed forces could also be feminine, a reassurance that was made through such materials as photographs of carefully lipsticked and rouged women in uniform. So while men who didn’t inadequately support the war effort were mocked as inadequately manly, as in fig. 25, women who did support the war effort didn’t experience the same disdain. Stein’s driving, both in terms of its appropriate patriotic heroism and inappropriate gender performance, serves nicely as a symbol of how she was both broadly queer and respectable. Stein’s volunteer service is referenced in the June 1918 issue of Vanity Fair, which featured Stein’s poem “The Great American Army.” Though Stein’s queer gender performance is noted, the overall presentation is that of a respectable, admirable patriot. 360 Gertrude Stein, the first and most representative of the so-called cubists in prose, has, since the outbreak of the war, been living in France and working in war relief as an ambulance driver. Few American women have taken a more active part in the conflict than she. During the past few weeks, the continued arrival of our troops in France has inspired her to compose this poem. (31) This introduction—and, indeed, the poem itself—are dwarfed by the accompanying lithograph by official French war painter Lucien Jonas, which takes up more than three times the space on the page than the introduction and the poem combined. In Courage, Mes Braves! J’arrive!, American soldiers come to the aid of France under the aegis of the Statue of Liberty, who returns to her birthplace with an unusually fierce, grave expression (fig. 30). Fig. 30: Courage, Mes Braves! J’arrive!, Lucien Jonas 361 Liberty regards the viewer directly, but is modeled less substantially than the three soldiers, who look to the left, presumably encouraging La France. Jonas presents the French vision of liberty—a vision that France gave to the Americans—supervising the return of liberty to France through American means. Only a forced or out-of-context reading could view this visual spectacle as queer. Between this introduction and the poem itself, one expects fairly straightforward patriotic verse. Yet “The Great American Army” is more immediately experimental than either “Relief Work in Paris” or “A League.” Its first stanza pulls no unconventional punches: I found an acorn today. Green In the center. No, on the end. And what is the name of the bridge? This is what we say. “The Great American Army,”— That is what we say. (31) The average reader of Vanity Fair was likely to be more comfortable with such poetry than the average reader of Life but would nonetheless have been severely challenged. Here, Stein’s queerness and respectability become marbled. It is interesting that aspects of Stein’s queerness, over time, made her respectable as she became an established voice of the avant-garde. Consider how the editors introduce her four poems in the March, 1919 Vanity Fair with a lengthy paragraph that concludes as follows: …just as surely did Miss Stein introduce a new artform. Whether or not you like her art form—or lack of it, rather, whether or not you understand the cryptic 362 meaning of her verses, there she is, and there is her influence, and there are her changes, and there will they remain. Vanity Fair has published poems by Miss Stein before; poems that have, to be sure, been often greatly misunderstood. But these are some which have just reached us from her in Paris. (88b) Stein is “cryptic” and “often greatly misunderstood”; she is, from earlier in the same introduction, “the American woman, who, operating from Paris as her basis, has stirred the critics and people of taste all over the world to the verge of ecstasy—or insensate fury” (88b). She is as much a phenomenon as an author of literature to be read. Note that the editor twice mentions that Stein and the poems come from Paris, as if this pedigree proves that these poems have genuine avant-garde merit and literary value, and validates their publication in Vanity Fair. Even Stein’s wartime service is portrayed as queer: “She is an able woman, very able. Lately she has been doing yeoman service for the American army in France, having driven an ambulance for over two years, and having driven it extremely well.” The odd repetition of “able” signifies that Stein’s volunteer work, however able, is somehow off-kilter. At the same time, however, Stein is presented as respectable because she and her work provoke people “all over the world to the verge of ecstasy—or insensate fury.” In short, Stein is an old hand of the avant- garde, respectable because her outrageousness has been tested by time: “there is her influence, and there are her changes, and there will they remain” (88b). Stein’s lasting power would continue to make her respectable. By the 1933 publication of The Autobiography, she had been a public figure for twenty-four years, and familiarity had dulled some of her queerness. In addition, some of her attributes were no longer queer. For instance, by 1933, visual modernism was a solid financial investment, and had begun to be taught in universities. 37 Stein’s respectability, combined 363 with her broad queerness, provided both a closet and a platform for aspects of her work and persona that were specifically lesbian. Gertrude Stein, Opium Queen My next observation is difficult to reconcile with the current construction of Stein’s celebrity persona, and at first glance, hard to credit. Nonetheless, I will show that from the 1910s up until the 1940s, when a substantive population throughout the United States pictured Gertrude Stein, they imagined her lounging on a divan, smoking. Sometimes she hallucinated, and sometimes she was intoxicated. Sometimes she smoked opium, and sometimes hashish. In most versions of this fantasy, Stein lounged, and by lounging, exhibited wealth, ease, and the self-conscious, sexual display traditionally associated with divans and chaises longues. 38 We saw a version of this fantasy in “La Grand Fête Americaine,” where Samuel Blythe configured Stein’s disciple as an androgynous “tall, serious, pale young man” who, even while being roughhoused, clasped “his little paper-covered book to his heart and his eyes were rolling in a fine frenzy” (11, 32). As Stein’s followers were portrayed as decadent, so Stein was herself. Now while Gertrude Stein was many things in her long, eventful life, she was never an opium-smoking, absinthe-sipping, smoky-eyed femme fatale straight out of a decadent salon of the 1890s. The notion is unsupported by either Stein’s biography or work. Stein did hold court at her own and others’ parties, and she certainly had a memorable sexual presence. Yet Stein seems never to have lounged on a divan with a long cigarette holder or opium pipe, or to have dripped ice-cold water over a cube of 364 sugar until the Green Fairy was properly diluted and turned an opalescent, milky white. More precisely, while Stein almost certainly did lean or lay back in a relaxed position with her back supported, she seems never to have been seductive in the traditional manner of a woman offering a calculated display of sexual availability. This is not to suggest that individual men and women did not find Stein sexually attractive. They did. I am not discussing the most potent forms of sexual desire, but the most publicly acceptable and easily understood: the images of sexual attractiveness that circulated in the press, and against which individual desires were measured, and thereby determined normal and appropriate, or not. Stein’s reputation as an absinthe and opium queen—as a rich, languid femme fatale prone to dissipation and excess—is an example of how the mass public configured Stein in non-threatening terms that were easily understood. After the sensations of the Armory Show and Tender Buttons, Stein’s broad queerness was so pronounced in the American imagination that she was freely associated with behaviors and attributes that were not her own but were nonetheless present in stereotypes of female inappropriate behavior. Putting Stein on the opium couch made her safer and more comprehensible, both more appealing and easier to dismiss. Both the press and other artworks consistently pointed away from Stein’s sexuality and towards frivolity, decadence, deviance, and ridicule, the calling cards of the fin-de-siècle and its reception. 39 As a thorough analysis of the variety of ways and means that Stein’s sexuality has been deflected could fill a book, I have chosen to focus on the improbable reign of Gertrude Stein, Opium Queen a) because the ridiculousness of her reign exemplifies the 365 great lengths by which Stein was willfully misunderstood, b) because her reign offers a clear example of how Stein’s homosexuality was cloaked in a standard mode of heterosexuality, and c) because her reign reaches back through the fin-de-siècle to Wilde, who set the stage for much of the portrayal and understanding of homosexuality in twentieth-century culture. To prove that Stein’s reputation as a fin-de-siècle femme fatale was so strong that it withstood a steadily increasing flow of contrary evidence, I read Stein’s visual record against two written descriptions that attest to her reputation as an Opium Queen both before and after she was on the cover of TIME. A 1922 reminiscence by Sherwood Anderson recalls his misconception of Stein before he met her in 1921, and a 1946 reminiscence of Richard Wright recalls Wright’s own misconception of Stein in the mid-1930s. Anderson’s and Wright’s anecdotes also offer evidence of how Stein’s broad queerness was so strongly fixed in the public imagination that it could freely travel along any number of non-normative chains of association, no matter how unlikely. This was the freedom that, when coupled with respectability, successfully cloaked the unprecedented exhibition of lesbian identity and erotics in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. Today, the thought of Stein as an Opium Queen is gratingly silly. But in the 1910s and 20s, and to an extent the 1930s, the public was drawing a logical conclusion from the available evidence. Stein was a Jewish, unmarried, financially independent woman who lived in France and collected art, socialized in a circle of the most avant- garde artists and writers, and was herself an experimental writer. As we have seen, there was a pre-established web of associations in the United States between Frenchness, 366 Jewishness, the avant-garde, perverse sexuality, and gendered non-conformity. The sticky connotations of this web placed Stein as a wealthy, decadent woman whose place in the expatriate avant-garde had been earned by the traditional means for women to win influence and attention: money and sex appeal. Sherwood Anderson illustrates this attitude in an essay first published in 1922 as “The Work of Gertrude Stein” in The Little Review, and used later that same year as the introduction to Stein’s Geography and Plays: I had myself heard stories of a long dark room with a languid woman lying on a couch, smoking cigarettes, sipping absinthes perhaps and looking out upon the world with tired, disdainful eyes. Now and then she rolled her head slowly to one side and uttered a few words, taken down by a secretary who approached the couch with trembling eagerness to catch the falling pearls. (6) Consider how Anderson configures Stein’s art as “dropped pearls” created when Stein “rolled her head slowly to one side and uttered a few words.” The metaphor implies Stein is so rich that she can drop pearls, so indolent that her only effort is in the service of intoxication and in slowly rolling her head to the side to dictate her poems, and so secure in her worth that a servant invariably “approached the couch with trembling eagerness to catch the falling pearls” (6). Stein has “tired, disdainful eyes” not from work, but with the world-weariness that plagues those who have exhausted life’s excitements and pleasures. Her sexual appeal is not explicitly denoted but is nonetheless inherent in the trope of “a languid woman reclining on a couch.” 40 Anderson is referencing the outdated image of the fin-de-siècle femme fatale, and the corona of associations that hazily radiated from her: the Decadent Countess, the Siren of the Opium Den, the Odalisque in the Turkish Bath, the Vivacious Vamp, and the Small-Town Girl Gone to Europe and Gone Bad. In the American imagination, absinthe, 367 opium, and hashish had the added advantage of being both widely known in the United States and definitely “foreign” through their association with, respectively, France, China, and the Middle East and India. The drugs were therefore tags for the dangerous, foreign, and unnatural in the American imagination. The image of Stein seductively smoking on her divan had the added advantage of challenging neither the dominance of heterosexuality nor the idea that female sexual appeal was for the benefit of men. Furthermore, in the 1910s and 20s, the appeal and danger of absinthe and opium was old news; had been tamed, processed and understood; and could now be enjoyed as fantasy. Laws had begun to be passed against opium in the United States in the 1870s; by 1922, when Anderson wrote “The Work of Gertrude Stein,” the United States had been through half a century of anti-opium scares and crusades, and the drug was heavily regulated. 41 Similarly, absinthe, which Anderson also mentions in relation to Stein, was banned in the United States in 1912 and France in 1915, and no longer had the presence that it did a few decades earlier. The staying power of Stein as a drug-ingesting decadent is illustrated by Richard Wright, who, as we shall see, was confronted in the mid-1930s with a condemnation of Stein for “spen[ding] her days reclining upon a silken couch in Paris smoking hashish” (I Wish 15). In the 1930s, absinthe and opium use were too dated to support a contemporary fantasy. Stein’s drug of choice was therefore updated to hashish, which was a national concern in the 1930s. 42 Hashish was therefore more credible a drug for Stein-via-Wright than opium and absinthe were for Stein-via- Anderson, a credibility which accords with the harsher, less romantic vision of Stein that we will see in Wright’s report. 368 Sherwood Anderson’s and Richard Wright’s similar misconceptions of Stein are particularly telling of Stein’s reputation in the United States as the men were of different races and classes, were born thirty-two years apart, and recollect almost twenty-five years apart. Anderson, born 1876, was a lifelong Midwesterner whose best-known work, Winesburg, Ohio (1919), was a collection of short stories that exposed the loneliness and desperation of the small-town America glorified by the Saturday Evening Post. Wright, by contrast, was a Southerner who wrote two of the most important twentieth-century works of African-American literature: the novel Native Son (1940) and the memoir Black Boy (1945). 43 Though both men were politically liberal and wrote in the American modernist tradition, and though Wright lived in Chicago for much of his twenties, Anderson and Wright were never part of the same artistic circle, with the exception of their common friendship with Stein. At the time that Anderson and Wright received their reports of Gertrude Stein, Opium Queen, they were nascent writers who had only one foot in bohemian circles; they bespeak Stein’s reputation outside the bounds of elite culture. Anyone more familiar with elite culture would know that the reputation was foolish, and anyone who wasn’t interested in elite culture probably wouldn’t be moved to write anything down—which explains why there are not more examples of Stein’s reputation as an opium queen by writers and artists. Anderson and Wright both state that they wish to correct their own earlier impression of Stein, which Anderson says is at large in the United States: “As there is in America an impression of Miss Stein’s personality, not at all true and rather 369 foolishly romantic, I would like first of all to brush that aside” (6). Both men want the public to see a woman closer to their own personal experience of Stein. Anderson’s reminiscence is offered as an excuse; he misunderstood Stein and now wishes to correct that misunderstanding in others. He notes both the appeal and extent of this “foolishly romantic” persona, which is happily superseded by a better reality: You will perhaps understand some of my own surprise and delight when, after having been fed up on such tales and rather Tom Sawyerishly hoping they might be true, I was taken to her to find instead of this languid impossibility a woman of striking vigor, a subtle and powerful mind, a discrimination in the arts such as I have found in no other American born man or woman, and a charmingly brilliant conversationalist. (6) As Anderson tries to reposition Stein for public consumption in the introduction to Geography and Plays, he assures us that Stein is not a “languid woman lying on a couch, smoking cigarettes, sipping absinthes perhaps and looking out upon the world with tired, disdainful eyes” (6). These, says Anderson, are “Tom Sawyerish” fantasies: adolescent untruths told to excite both teller and hearer. In fact, Stein is a proper American with good Midwestern characteristics and values. She is vigorous in body and powerful in mind, and has an unusual capacity for discrimination—for saying what is good and what is bad. In addition to this moral rectitude, Stein has that other all-important aspect of proper Midwestern femininity: that of being a brilliant, charming talker. In a 1933 appreciation of Stein published in the periodical Wings, Anderson goes so far as to characterize Stein as a folksy grandmother: “She is an American woman of the old sort, one who cares for the handmade goodies and who scorns the factory-made food, and in 370 her own great kitchen, she is making something with her materials, something sweet to the tongue and fragrant to the nostrils” (13). 44 In other words: America, open your arms! Those arms stayed closed. Anderson’s introduction was an intelligent repositioning of Stein’s persona, but the content of Geography and Plays—a collection of some of Stein’s more experimental works—better suited the American conception of an absinthe-sipper than that of an old-fashioned grandma of Terre Haute, Indiana. Anderson’s description of Stein’s reputation does, however, offer insight into how Stein’s persona referenced her homosexuality, both specifically through the trace of Stein’s partner and generally through Stein’s residence in a louche bohemia. From a contemporary perspective, we can detect Alice B Toklas in the person of the secretary who approaches Stein with “trembling eagerness,” though the actual Toklas was not much prone to trembling. While the great majority of Stein’s contemporaries didn’t know about Toklas, they did know that single working women refuted the social commandment to marry and were therefore somewhat suspect. In addition, the American public knew that Paris was the natural habitat of the lesbian. Until the 1928 publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, which would become the most famous lesbian novel of the twentieth century, most of the available depictions of female same-sexuality in America were in French literature. This lesbian placement meshed nicely in the American imagination with the non-normative behavior and sexuality that Americans already believed native to France—a placement that raises the possibility that the reputation of the femme fatale, also native to France, at times served as cover for lesbians both within and without the lesbian community. From 371 Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), the heroine of which is a female cross-dresser who forms the acute point of a love triangle with a man and his mistress, to the lesbian poems redacted from Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) that circulated privately and were whispered about broadly, most of the lesbians that Americans read about either lived in Paris or considered it a refuge. For instance, Stephen Gordon, the hero of The Well of Loneliness, moves to Paris to escape a depression caused by her mother’s refusal to accept her as a lesbian and her lover’s abandonment of her in favor of a heterosexual marriage. Gordon’s introduction to “lesbian Paris” comes in the salon of Valérie Seymour, which has suitably disordered fin- de-siècle trappings, complete with dust, exotic odors, antique vases, sweetmeats, a broken musical instrument, and the expected enormous chaise longue: The odour of somebody’s Oriental scent was mingling with the odour of tuberoses in a sixteenth-century chalice. On a divan, whose truly regal proportions occupied the best part of the shadowy alcove, lay a box of Fuller’s peppermint creams and a lute, but the strings of the flute were broken. (246) After, Gordon muses that “in Paris I might make some sort of a home, I could work here—and then of course there are people....” (250, ellipsis Hall). Gordon’s notion provokes a strong reaction in her ex-governess Puddle, who has appointed herself as Stephen’s lesbian nursemaid and mentor: “Something started to hammer in Puddle’s brain: ‘Like to like! Like to like! Like to like!’ it hammered (250). Clearly, this introduction to lesbian Paris has struck a chord for both women. The Well of Loneliness was published six years after Anderson’s introduction, but its depiction of “lesbian Paris” is very much of a piece with other depictions of female same-sexuality that filtered into the American imagination through pornography and 372 gossip. The Parisian cohort of American and British lesbian and bisexual women writers and artists whose residence lasted from 1900 to World War II came to Paris in part because of this literature and this reputation. The reputation of the resulting community extended considerably farther than their limited audience, and further heightened the call of Paris for lesbians. Though Anderson may not have known about the specific women who made up this Parisian cohort, it’s likely that he knew, however faintly, of the existence of a lesbian demimonde in Paris, and this probably colored his imagining of what Stein was like. Yet he imagines someone along the lines of Renee Vivien, the suicidal, probably anorexic British expatriate poet who gargled cologne to disguise the alcohol on her breath, rather than Stein. 45 The similarity of Anderson’s account of Stein to Richard Wright’s is remarkable. Anderson writes in 1922, remembering his conception of Stein before he met her in 1921; Wright writes in 1946, remembering either 1934 or 1935, when there was a spate of Stein commentary in the press due to her American lecture tour of those years. Throughout his career, Wright was a fan of Stein’s. After they met and became friends, Wright, like Anderson, tried to increase Stein’s readership through material help as well as friendship. Wright wrote a positive review for Wars I Have Seen (1945) and a dust-jacket blurb for Brewsie and Willie (1946), and selected an excerpt from “Melanctha” for his contribution to 1946 anthology I Wish I’d Written That, where writers introduced authors whose work they admired. In his review of Wars I Have Seen, Wright wrote specifically about how he couldn’t reconcile his admiration for Stein’s writing with her pubic persona. Wright 373 shares his cognitive dissonance when he tried to reconcile his admiration of Stein’s Three Lives (1909) with Stein’s reputation as a decadent: But in the midst of my delight, I was jolted. A left-wing literary critic whose judgment I had been led to respect, condemned Miss Stein in a sharply-worded newspaper article, implying that she spent her days reclining upon a silken couch in Paris smoking hashish, that she was a hopeless prey to hallucinations, and that her tortured verbalisms were throttling the revolution. I was disturbed. Had I duped myself into worshiping decadence? (15) Wright, like Anderson, had received notice of Stein as a bored, rich aesthete with an air of decadent sexuality that wafts from “reclining upon a silken couch in Paris.” This report of Stein’s decadence was irreconcilable with Wright’s belief that Three Lives’ “Melanctha” was an important milestone for the literary representation of African- Americans, as detailed in Chapter 3. Wright was strongly committed to the party line of the Old Left when he first came across Stein’s work, and the Old Left didn’t recognize oppression by gender and sexuality. (The party did recognize aspects of racial oppression at this time, but racial prejudice within the party would eventually lead to Wright’s estrangement.) As discussed in Chapter 2, the association between male homosexuality, luxury, and the upper classes—already positioned as effeminate in American culture due to their apparent estrangement from “masculine” work—had been cemented in the public imagination by the Wilde Trials. That cement held strong until Gay Liberation in the 1970s and helped form generations of gay men who found the British upper class one of the few available sites of homosexual representation available at large to the American public. This cement also attached to the Left, who viewed homosexuality as a symptom of upper-class decadence. Generally speaking, for the Left, there was no homosexual 374 proletariat, and for homosexuals, there was no place of affiliation with the lower classes; gay men were more likely, at least in their imaginations, to have more in common with impoverished aristocrats who had lost their income, title, and land than with impoverished peasants who never had them in the first place. The two groups as a rule did not find common cause. The situation was more complicated for gay women, due to the general invisibility of female same-sexuality through much of the twentieth century, which led to a comparatively shallow set of cultural denotation and connotations. Those signifiers of female same-sexuality that were visible, such as cross-dressing, were associated with masculinity. 46 The twentieth-century cliché that a fantasy evening for gay men was a elegant dinner party, and for gay women, a fight in a working-class bar, indicates how the two groups were differentiated by the gendered association of luxury with effeminacy. Insofar as a gay woman saw herself as masculine rather than feminine, she was less likely to view herself as an aristocrat by nature. Nonetheless, the decadence and general queerness of the aristocracy in the American imagination sometimes overcame the male/female duality to allow for the presence of female same-sexuality in their imagined ranks. The monied, starry ranks of the Parisian lesbian demimonde also helped strengthen the association between aristocratic, bohemian decadence and female same- sexuality for Americans. 47 Broadly speaking, the Parisian lesbian in the American imagination might wear mannish suits, but they were chic, well-tailored suits, and they were worn in exquisite surroundings. 375 Stein was suspect to leftist critics not only because of her homosexuality (which might be publicly inferred, but which was only known in literary and bohemian circles) but also because the Communist Party of the United States had little time for avant-garde art. 48 One was either with the party or against it, and party hardliners held that the only valid purpose of art was to help the revolution; art that didn’t hew to the party line was yet another opiate of the masses. From this perspective, Stein’s work, once she abandoned the naturalism of Q.E.D. and Three Lives, was appalling. Tender Buttons was not only an opiate, but also a poor opiate, one that didn’t even bring the masses the same ignorant, counterproductive relief as religion. While I cannot determine what specific review of Stein “by a prominent left-wing critic” causes Wright to doubt his appreciation of Stein, there’s an excellent chance that Wright is discussing “Gertrude Stein: A Literary Idiot,” a caustic 1934 review of Stein’s work written by Michael Gold. Gold, a prominent left-wing critic was the author of the working-class memoir Jews without Money (1930) and the editor-in-chief of The New Masses, where the article appeared. The New Masses was not an official organ but nonetheless served as an unofficial voice of the Party and its fellow travelers. Even if Wright isn’t discussing “A Literary Idiot,” the article he is discussing is certainly written along the same party lines. Its author, like Gold, believed that Stein’s work was an example of “art that exists in the vacuum of a private income,” art that “arises out of a false conception of the nature of art and of the function of language,” art that “did not communicate because there was nothing to communicate” (Gold, Change the World! 25). 49 376 At bottom, the author accuses Stein of hallucinating on a couch when she should be worrying about the plight of the worker, or even better, coming to his aid. (For Marxists of this time, the worker was almost always a man.) Gold or his ally holds that “The literary idiocy of Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values. It is part of the signs of doom that are written largely everywhere on the walls of bourgeois society” (24-25). The question of whether Stein was a capitalist, and therefore the propriety of the above class-based attack, is an interesting one. How privileged was Stein? Was she in fact rich? 50 Stein grew up in a cosmopolitan family that traveled widely, had domestic help, and experienced considerable fluctuation in their income. They were best compared in today’s terms to the upper-middle class; the Steins were by no means “rich.” Her brothers and sister by and large continued in this tradition, though Stein did have one brother who became a streetcar conductor. As an adult, Stein lived off an inheritance that allowed her a secure fixed income. From a Marxist perspective, this would have been irrefutable evidence that she was a capitalist parasite. Living abroad substantively increased the value of Stein’s income and raised her standard of living. Stein never had to work for money, and almost always had a housekeeper/cook, and at times a larger staff. She had sufficient funds to collect modern art—which was inexpensive when she and her brother Leo began their collection. Her background, education and circle made her extraordinarily well-endowed in cultural capital—a capital that, due to her art collection and her residence in France, appreciated throughout her lifetime. Nonetheless, until the mid-1930s, Stein always had to be careful with and conscious of money, and at 377 times was forced to sell pieces of her collection to meet unusual expenses. She lived unextravagantly, and spent almost no money on usual markers of wealth, such as clothes. Stein never did become “rich,” and in comparison to some of her wealthy friends, such a Mabel Dodge, her income was negligible. In short, while she had a fairly precarious hold on a lifestyle that, from Gold’s or his surrogate’s perspective if not necessarily her own, was inarguably privileged. Unsurprisingly, the author concludes that Stein’s writing is symptomatic of the decadence of wealth: A leisure class, which exists on the labor of others, which has no function to perform in society except the clipping of investment coupons, develops ills and neuroses. It suffers perpetually from boredom….They seek new sensations, new adventures constantly in order to give themselves feelings…..In this light, one can see that to Gertrude Stein and to the other artists like her, art exists in the vacuum of a private income. In order to pursue the kind of art, in order to be the kind of artist Gertrude Stein is, it is necessary to live in that kind of society which will permit one to have a private income from wealthy parents or sound investments. (25) Gold or his comrade (henceforth referenced as Gold alone) tells Marxists how they should respond to Stein’s decadence: “They see in the work of Gertrude Stein extreme symptoms of the decay of capitalist culture. They view her work as the complete attempt to annihilate all relations between the artist and the society in which he lives” (210). Wright is so ashamed by Gold’s reprimand that he provides a test to prove Stein’s leftist bona fides. Wright needs to publicly witness—both to himself and to his reading public—that the proletariat does, indeed, appreciate Stein: Believing in direct action, I contrived a method to gauge the degree to which Miss Stein’s prose was tainted with the spirit of counter-revolution. I gathered a group of semi-literate Negro stockyard workers—‘basic proletarians with the instinct for revolution’…—into a Black Belt basement and read Melanctha aloud to them. 378 They understood every word. Enthralled, they slapped their thighs, howled, laughed, stomped, and interrupted me constantly to comment upon the characters. My fondness for Stein never distressed me after that. (Rev. of Wars 15) 51 To an extent, the disagreement between Gold (or his surrogate) and Wright is a false one. Wright is discussing Stein’s Three Lives, which I argue in Chapters 3 and 4 is in many ways a naturalist work that exposes the plight of women oppressed by race, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation. In other words, Three Lives is a work that a good Leftist can consider admirable, so long as said Leftist considers race, gender, and sexuality “valid” forms of oppression. Gold is discussing Stein’s more experimental work (specifically, the word portrait “Matisse”), which has different merits. Nonetheless, the class analysis of Gold’s “Gertrude Stein, Literary Idiot” shines further light on how Stein’s broad queerness enfolds her specific homosexuality, insomuch as the official party line of the 1930s held homosexuality to be yet another symptom of how the rich are so removed from the conditions of existence that they “seek new sensations, new adventures constantly in order to give themselves feelings” (25). 52 One didn’t have to be a Marxist, however, to see Stein as decadent. Consider Don Marquis, a popular humorist of the 1910s and 1920s. Marquis is best known today for the important modernist comic archy and mehitabel (1916-1935), the story of a cockroach who wrote free verse to court a cat, and to document his courtship. Marquis based some of his verse on Stein’s work, and included Stein by name and inference in a number of parodies that were published in his column in the New York Sun. Many of Marquis’s parodies of Stein and those whom Marquis imagined to be her adherents were collected and published as Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious 379 Thinkers (1916). 53 The narrator of most of the volume is Hermione, a proper young lady who becomes infatuated with the avant-garde movements and salons (then called “little groups”) of Greenwich Village: ….the Brainstorm Slum, the land of Futile Piffledom; a salon weird where congregate Freak, Nut and Bug and Psychic Bum. (“Proem 2-5”) Gertrude Stein is one of the primary idols of this group, as discussed at the start of “She Refused to Give up the Cosmos”: We’ve taken up Gertrude Stein—our little Group of serious thinkers you know— and she’s wonderful; simply WONDERFUL She Suggests the Inexpressible, you know. Of course, she is a Pioneer. And with all Pioneers—don’t you think?—the Reach is greater than the Grasp. Not that you can tell what she means But in the New Art one doesn’t have to mean things, does one? One strikes the chords, and the chords vibrate. Aren’t Vibrations just too perfectly lovely for Anything? (1-13) Through Hermione, Marquis combines upper-class feminine diction of the day—“Aren’t Vibrations just too perfectly lovely for anything?” and juvenile repetition and capitalization—“and she’s wonderful; simply WONDERFUL”—with a hodgepodge of trendy subject matter, including psychical research, the Bhagavad-Gita, Nietzsche, vers 380 libre, Bergson, Etruscan vases, Spiritualism, and many other examples of what Hermione calls the “New Art.” For Marquis, the “New Art,” at least as interpreted by the “little groups” of Greenwich Village, is a fatuous, shoddy consumer “good” that feeds an appetite seeking novelty and cheap cultural capital but offers no sustenance. Marquis relentlessly equates the “little groups” with idiocy; false and futile social protest and progress; and the amusement of the insufficiently occupied members of the white upper class. The titles of a few of the Hermione poems illustrate this perspective: “Hermione on Fashions and War”; “Will the Best People Receive the Superman Socially?”; “Fothergil Finch Tell of His Revolt Against Organized Society”; “Mama is So Mid-Victorian”; “The Japanese are Wonderful, If You Get What I Mean”; “How Suffering Purifies One!”; “Prison Reform and Poise.” There is a whiff of inappropriate sexuality and intoxication to “the land of futile piffledom,” but Marquis indicates that it is not to be taken seriously, like the little groups themselves. For instance, towards the end of “She Refuses to Give Up the Cosmos,” Hermione’s mother attempts to reign in her daughter. Mama—poor dear Mamma!—she is so terribly unadvanced, you know!—Mamma said: “Hermione, I do not know what the Cosmos is. But this I do know—not another Sex Discussion or East Indian Swami will never come into THIS house!” “Mamma,” I said to her. “I will NOT give up the Cosmos. It means everything to me; simply EVERYTHING!” (27-33) Hermione’s salon may include “Sex Discussions,” but these do not seriously threaten Hermione’s propriety. As Marquis presents them, these Sex Discussions—like the East 381 Indian Swami, whom Mamma banished for possessing seven wives, one of each of his planes of spiritual existence—are essentially trivial and childish. Their threat is venial, not mortal. For Marquis, Stein’s poems cannot be understood because they have no meaning except as a marker for the worthless avant-garde. In this way, she is comparable to a brand name that adorns an ill-designed and -constructed pocketbook and therefore makes it desirable. Marquis expresses this succinctly in “Gertrude Is Stein, Stein Gertrude: That is All Ye Know on Earth, and All Ye Need to Know.” This poem wasn’t collected in Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers, probably because “Gertrude Is Stein” is in the first person plural, while all the other poems are in Hermione’s voice, except for the first and last, which have an omniscient point of view. Nonetheless, “Gertrude Is Stein” was presented in the 15 October 1914 New York Evening Sun as the product of Hermione and friends. Marquis offers the poem as an answer to a “Puzzled Reader” who asks: “Who Is Gertrude Stein?” In response, Hermione and her friends write: Who is Meredith? And Hardy? Who is Conrad? Who is James? All we know of Gertrude—really—is that she is Gertrude Stein! ‘Tis enough for us we have her—(she, the subtle Theban Sphinx: All the spheres swoon in silence when she stutters out her thinks!) (1-4) Literary critic Alison Tischler, discussing a slightly different version of the poem, observes that “Marquis has placed his poem and Steinian language in an aesthetic loop; the similarity of his response to the reader’s query and Stein’s own writing style is underlined by [its] title” (20). Tischler’s analysis is in the service of the point that such 382 parodies taught a mass public who had not read Stein the aims and means of her poetic language. 54 The poem’s intended and I daresay primary purpose, however, is to mock Stein. Note how Hermione and friends respond to Puzzled Reader’s “Who is Gertrude Stein?” with parallel questions—“Who is Meredith? Who is Hardy? Who is Conrad? Who is James?”—about authors at the height of respectability in 1914 (1). This move equates Stein with Meredith, Hardy, Conrad and James, and implies that they, like Stein, are brand names whose meaning is inherent in their status, their name, and not in their work. Line 2 reiterates the title’s claim that Stein is Stein, which is sufficient to prove her worth, while line 3 hold that Stein’s persona fulfills without a corresponding understanding of her work, and that she is equal in her mystery and grandeur to monsters of antiquity. In line 4, Hermione and her coterie claim that Stein overawes even the heavens. This grandiosity, coupled with the excessive s’s of lines 3 and 4, renders these claims silly, which reverberates with Marquis’ aims of making Stein and her followers ridiculous. The closing couplet of the poem reiterates its argument: Let us search not, seek not, ask not, why the blessing has been sent— Little Groups, we have our Gertrude: worship her, and be content! In other words: Adore and shut up. Marquis and Gold configure Stein as a queen of decadence; they disagree over the content and danger of said decadence, but they concur with Stein’s reign. Both present the appreciation of Stein and her poetry as luxurious self-indulgence lacking moral and intellectual discipline. While Gold views the “cult” of Stein as a symptom of a corrosive decline in society, Marquis views it as an essentially harmless elevation of self- 383 indulgence and pretension—as childish foolishness to be taken as seriously as Hermione herself. Between them, Marquis and Gold offer visions of Stein at two different ends of the spectrum of the dismissal and disapproval of decadence during and after the fin-de- siècle: decadence as naïve, superficial, and ineffectual, or decadence as perverse, destructive, and insane. When this difference is accounted for, Stein is revealed yet again as a kind of opium queen, one who sustains Sex Discussions with swamis. Opium never appears in Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers, not even in the poem “Moods and Poppies”; presumably, opium was too “hard” a subject or interest for Hermione, who, like her “little group,” is conventional at heart. Instead, Marquis envisions Stein as a denatured opium queen, one who lacks drugs and fatal attraction but makes up for it with extra-large lashings of nonsense and illusion. Her brain might not be chemically altered, but she babbles and hallucinates nonetheless. Stein in and on TIME Michael Gold’s 1934 attack on Stein bears witness that the understanding of Gertrude Stein as a fin-de-siècle decadent withstood considerable visual evidence to the contrary. This configuration of Stein held through the 1920s and even the 1930s, when a number of visual and written portraits of Stein were widely distributed that explicitly did not portray Stein in the fin-de-siècle tradition. The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas was published in April 1933; Stein was on the cover of TIME magazine that September; Three Lives was re-issued in the Modern Library edition that October; Four Saints in Three Acts opened on Broadway in February 1934; and Stein herself went on the road with a well- 384 received lecture tour of the United States in 1934 and 1935 that echoed Oscar Wilde’s tour of more than thirty years before. The September 11, 1933 cover of TIME magazine is a particularly important marker of Stein’s mass celebrity. The magazine offered a widely-available image of Stein to a large number of Americans who may not have been interested in writing, art, or Stein but nonetheless read TIME, one of the largest selling magazines at a time when magazines and newspapers constituted the majority of the media, distantly followed by books and the cinema. Even those who didn’t read TIME would be likely to see the cover of Stein at the newsstand, which was then a site of considerable commerce and cultural importance. Stein was now part of the visual vocabulary of those who were not interested in art—of even those who didn’t read. Stein’s cover of TIME suits the rest of her visual record, which never made her out to be an odalisque. Whatever the truth of Stein’s habit of rest, the many artists who represented her visually—in paintings, sculpture, and photography—did not often, if ever, portray her reclining. Neither the primary written biographies of Stein (by Bridgman, Brinnin, Hobhouse, Mellow, Wagner-Martin, and Wineapple, all well- illustrated except for Bridgman) nor the extensive pictorial biography by Renate Stendahl display Stein seductively reclining in a conventional feminine manner. 55 Instead, the drawn, pictorial, sculptural, and photographed representations of Stein portray her as large, solid, and stable. Stein often stands in these images, and when she sits, she sits squarely, with her feet firmly on the ground. In addition, Stein is invariably modestly dressed, and her expression is never conventionally seductive. Sometimes she seems 385 cross or tired; sometimes she seems to share a joke. She never offers a conventional feminine come-hither glance. All these aspects are apparent in Picasso’s 1906 portrait of Stein (fig. 31), one of the most circulated visual representations of Stein’s portraits before she was on the cover of TIME. The Picasso portrait was and is widely held not to look much like Stein but nonetheless embodies the above aspects of her visual persona as much as the Man Ray photograph of Stein sitting next to the portrait (fig. 32). These representations of Stein— especially the Picasso—are important works of art both in terms of the artists’ development and in terms of modernist portraiture. Fig. 31: Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906. 386 Fig 32: Man Ray, Gertrude Stein and Picasso’s Portrait, 1922. 13,The Picasso and Man Ray portraits also relate in complex and interesting ways to Stein’s accepted role as the writer who attempted to put the precepts of visual modernism into prose form, as well as to her own interest in varieties of perception and representation. I offer them here not in these respects, but for how they illustrate Stein’s body size and clothes, lack of conventional feminine appeal, and facial expression. As James Agee writes in TIME’s cover story on Stein, she was often envisioned by her readers via her portraits, which were numerous: “If posterity understands present- day art, it is likely that the future will have a pretty good idea of what Stein looked like. Picasso has painted her, Picabia has drawn her, Jo Davidson has done a joss-like statue of her” (“Stein’s Way” 59). Agee writes that “We picture her as the great pyramidal Buddha of Jo Davidson's statue of her, eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the processes of being, registering the vibrations of a psychological 387 Fig. 33: Jo Davidson, Gertrude Stein, 1922 country like some august seismograph whose charts we haven’t the training to read” (39). 56 Neither Davidson’s 1922 statue (fig. 33) nor the Picasso or Picabia paintings are pictured in TIME; Agee assumes that his readers are familiar with them, or with other, similar portraits of Stein. The editors did not commission a new work for TIME’s own portrait of Stein. Instead, they cropped a 1931 photograph of Stein at home in Bilignin, France, taken by her friend, the gay fashion photographer George Platt Lynes (fig. 34). In the Lynes photo, Stein does not engage her audience in the usual roundelay of gaze and desire; her eyes neither seek, meet, nor avoid her viewer. The distance of her gaze is further accentuated by the near proximity of her body. Stein looks out in the distance; we can’t 388 see what holds her gaze, as her focus extends past the boundary of the photo, but what we do see is a spacious landscape. The close focus on Stein and the wide depth of field Fig. 34: Gertrude Stein by George Platt Lynes, 1931 leaves the landscape much less crisply defined than Stein, so much so that even a causal viewer is likely to make a formal observation about the photograph’s focus. Stein is therefore portrayed as more “real” than her sylvan setting; she is a palpably material woman in Arcadia. Her expression is pensive and self-contained, implying that even if she looks at other people, her attention is not fixed upon them. Her eyes are in shadow, further obscuring her expression. She appears to offer her full attention to whatever or whomever she considers and possibly observes, “eternally and placidly ruminating the gradual developments of the processes of being” (Agee 59). 389 In the context of the 1930s, both Stein’s hair and clothes are masculine. Stein’s haircut falls short of conventional female crop; in profile, her hair is identical to that of Caesar’s on a Roman coin, a similarity frequently noted both then and today. 57 Stein wears a masculine vest over a striped blouse, and the brooch that fastens her collar doesn’t soften her outfit but registers as a medal or necklace. Her attire is plain, “natural,” and does not draw attention to itself—all aspects of traditional masculinity that have been part of Stein’s public persona since its birth in “A Zolaesque American,” in the February 13, 1910 New York Press. While the Press doesn’t overly pronounce Stein’s clothes to be masculine, it does describe their masculine attributes: “For a street costume [Stein] wears always a brown corduroy suit, a short coat, and small, inconspicuous hat. When the telltale signs of wear and tear appear Miss Stein simply orders a duplicate to be made with no change in material or style” (2:1). For most of the twentieth century, male drag worn by female celebrities was almost always understood by the mainstream public to put the wearer’s femininity in sharper relief and thereby increase her heterosexual appeal. Stein was extremely unusual in that her portraits could not be easily read in terms of heterosexual appeal, at least in terms of the mass media. A useful comparison can be made between the 1931 Lynes photo and two still photos from the 1930 film Morocco, which prominently featured a woman in male drag. Consider the difference between Marlene Dietrich’s tuxedo (fig. 35) and Stein’s vest. Under Dietrich’s professional feminine make-up and hair, and on top of an apparent and conventionally beautiful young female body, the tuxedo’s masculinity is in quotes. In other words, the tuxedo is “masculine” rather than masculine; 390 Fig. 35: Marlene Dietrich, publicity still from Morocco (1930) it draws attention to itself, unlike Stein’s vest. Stein didn’t sport a theatrically “masculine” costume but wore masculine clothes. 58 Morocco, the film debut of Dietrich in the United States, was a popular and well- respected movie of its day, and reveals how male drag could be successfully presented within popular culture. The movie earned two million dollars at the box office (equivalent to more than 157 million today) and several nominations for an Academy Award. 59 When world-weary nightclub singer Amy Jolley—a pun on amie jolie, “beautiful lover”—makes her debut on the “best-paying stage in Africa” before an orchestra pit packed with the French Foreign Legion, she struts out wearing a top hat and 391 tails. The legionnaires, nonplussed, growl and shout. Jolley lights herself a cigarette in an assertive, masculine manner, and stands smoking until applause rises. Then she hitches up her trouser leg, sits on a railing, and starts to sing. When men attempt to fondle her, she glares them down; legionnaires roar. She takes a flower from a high- ranking woman in the audience—“May I have this?”—and when the song is over, kisses her on the lips. The woman simpers and hides her face. The crowd roars. Dietrich’s overall presentation in Morocco, both in the movie’s marketing and in the movie itself, is that of a conventional temptress. This can be seen in a publicity shot that shows her provocatively reclining on a chaise longue as the male lead, Gary Cooper, stares entranced (fig. 36). Fig. 36: Dietrich poses for the gaze of Cooper, publicity still for Morocco (1930) 392 Here, Dietrich is presented as Stein was inaccurately seen: as a femme fatale in a vaguely fin-de-siècle environment. Dietrich has the “tired, disdainful eyes” that Anderson imagined for Stein (“The Work” 6), and she is “reclining upon a silken couch,” as Gold (or his compère) imagined Stein to loll (“Literary Idiot” 16). Dietrich is pictured in what looks very much like an opium den, from the chinoiserie urn backed by exotic plumes, to the fabrics in Asian, Turkish, and Middle Eastern motifs, all traditionally associated with the fin-de-siècle den of sin. The film’s North African setting, with its strong association with hashish—a national concern in the 1930s, when the United States began to regulate cannabis—further associates Jolie with a decadent salon. Both within and without the confines of Morocco, Dietrich’s masculine dress, stance, walk, and kiss were not broadly understood as threatening but were read as enticing. Their departure from gender norms was provocative to heterosexual appetites rather than a refutation of them. Dietrich attracted both the minority who read same- sexual erotics in her performance and the majority who merely saw a particularly fatale appeal to men. Furthermore, Dietrich’s same-sex kiss is in the context of a nightclub act, and is therefore removed from the viewer by an additional level of artifice and fantasy than the rest of Morocco. Even the “real” part of the film was at a far remove from its viewers, whose lived experience was likely to be quite distant from the film’s stylized romance between a down-on-her-luck nightclub singer and a French legionnaire. Even within the nightclub act, the same-sex kiss is carefully couched in a heterosexual exchange. Before Jolley kisses her fan, she takes a flower from her; after the kiss, Jolley gives the flower to the Legionnaire played by Gary Cooper. While I have 393 not been able to substantiate the popular but possibly apocryphal story that Dietrich herself suggested both the kiss and the means for sneaking it past the censors, the fact remains that the kiss did evade censorship, almost certainly by being presented as part of a heterosexual flirtation. The kiss was thus made non-threatening even to those officials responsible for policing inappropriate sexuality. 60 Of course, giving a flower to a man was itself provocative in terms of gender roles, though perhaps less so when accompanied by drag, which makes it more easily understood as a joke, and therefore unthreatening. Overall, Dietrich’s performance of masculinity—her male drag and her homosexual kiss—was made acceptable by the carte blanche—carte rouge?—of the femme fatale. By contrast, Stein’s masculine presentation does not pay a similar obeisance to straight male desire. This was unusual, as male drag that could not be read in the service of heterosexual provocation usually did not enter the public sphere. True, Stein was not acting in motion pictures and being vetted by censorship boards—but she was being vetted by TIME and other major media outlets. Stein was able to publically present herself—and in forums where she had little agency, to be presented—outside the standard female continuum for two reasons. First, her sexual appeal was so unconventional that it wasn’t easily seen. What cannot be seen or at least sensed cannot threaten. Second, Stein’s public persona was that of a woman already outside of normal categories, so much so that she wasn’t judged by the usual sartorial rules. Stein’s body as well as her clothes did not suit a femme fatale. The shape of Stein’s body extended past the conventional limits of the female body as it was usually seen in the media—and Stein’s form was not shielded or disguised, as one might expect 394 of a bodily display that would not be considered conventionally attractive. When the editors of TIME cropped the 1931 George Platt Lynes photo for TIME’s September 11, 1933 cover (fig. 37), they made Stein look even larger than she did in the original photo (fig. 34). Fig. 37: TIME 9/11/33, photo by George Platt Lynes The cover photo accentuates Stein’s size; her body fully fills the left half of the picture frame, sloping out past the median line towards the bottom. In “Stein’s Way,” the article that accompanies Stein’s cover, Agee sustains the focus on Stein’s size. One of Agee’s 395 nicknames for Stein is “Mountain Stein,” and he makes Stein’s size the focus of his first paragraph: Like a huge squat mountain on a distant border of the literary kingdom, obscured not only by the cloudy procession of more Aprilly authors but by the self-induced fog that hangs around her close-cropped top, she has loomed from afar over the hinterland of letters, a sphinxlike, monolithic mass. Twenty years she has squatted there; eyes accustomed to the landscape are beginning to recognize something portentous in her massive outline. (57) The “mountain” is figurative, and references Stein’s literary influence, but there is clearly some slippage into a physical description of Stein’s “massive outline.” Stein is not only described as mountain but also dramatized as a mountain, complete with atmospheric effects. Instead of going unmentioned or being lightly touched upon, as would be usual for a woman of unusual size, Stein’s bulk is made fantastic, and used to symbolize her place in the literary world. Throughout the history of Stein’s public persona, her body has unusual prominence. As we will see, the photograph’s unvarnished representation of a woman’s size is unusual in the context of the cover of TIME. Nonetheless, the Lynes photo is more conventional in some respects than most images of Stein—at least those that were extant since Stein had cut her hair—which is presumably one of the reasons why the editors chose the Lynes photo for the cover. In most photographs, sculptures, and paintings of Stein, she meets or comes close to meeting the viewer’s gaze, often with a challenging, interrogatory, or otherwise “masculine” expression, as in Picasso’s and Man Ray’s portraits of Stein (figs. 31, 32). On the cover of TIME, however, Stein doesn’t challenge or otherwise interact with the viewer. She is in full profile, which removes her gaze even farther. 61 396 Putting Stein in full profile may have made her more conventional in terms of gender roles, but it made the photograph even more unusual in terms of TIME. The full profile portrait was an uncommon choice both for Lynes and for the cover of TIME, as it heightens the impression of a subject’s psychological distance, which ran counter to TIME’s tradition of showcasing a public figure whom the magazine put into conversation with the reader. Part of TIME’s contract with its audience was the promise that the cover would offer a trustworthy anointment of the most important man of the week, who would be profiled under the cover. I use “man of the week” advisedly, as for the first five decades of TIME, men were on the cover six times as much as women. 62 TIME’s success at fetishizing its cover led to such phenomena as its “Man of the Year” issues, usually TIME’s biggest sellers. Yet unlike the majority of TIME’s cover photos, Stein is not shown in order to bring her closer to TIME’s readers. Why? Because Stein is on the cover precisely because her eccentricity—her distance from the norm—is what brought her such wide notice, especially now that her fabulous strangeness has been made accessible through the easy-to-read The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. As Agee writes in “Stein’s Way,” “At one long-deferred bound she has moved from the legendary borders of literature into the very market-place, to face in the person a large audience of men-in-the-street” (56). Here, Agee equates Stein with an exotic animal “bounding” from distant surroundings to a domestic zoo. The singularity of Stein’s appearance in TIME is remarkable, especially when viewed in the context of the magazine and its founders. The achievement and impact of holding the cover of TIME can only be understood in terms of the magazine’s history. To 397 hold the cover indicated not only anointment as the most newsworthy person of the week by what soon became and remained the most popular American newsmagazine but also recognition by a forum which, though it presented itself as non-partisan, had broad, consistent conservative streaks, and substantively influenced the foreign policy of the United States. 63 TIME was the first weekly newsmagazine in the United States, founded in 1923 by Briton Hadden and Henry Luce. The twenty-four-year-olds had been educated among some of the richest and powerful children and young men in the United States. Hadden and Luce were both editors of competing publications at Hotchkiss prep school. In college, they were respectively chairman and managing editor of the Yale Daily News, and attended officer training school as sophomores at Camp Jackson, South Carolina. Hadden’s desire for a fresh, fun publication coupled with Luce’s more traditional approach to news reporting led to heavy coverage of popular culture and the entertainment industry as well as more traditional subjects: government, crime, international affairs, and economics. 64 Even in these more traditional subjects, TIME tried to tell the news through people—by, for instance, reducing complex political issues to single politicians, and making those politicians celebrities. This methodology was exemplified by the cover of TIME, which was at the magazine’s start was always (and usually still is) the portrait of a single person. Who held the cover of TIME? Unsurprisingly and overwhelmingly, old white men, almost all of whom were in the Eastern establishment that included Hadden and Luce. The only women featured in the magazine’s first 100 covers held the traditional 398 female roles of a dancer and a First Lady: Eleanora Duse (July 30, 1923) and Mrs. Herbert Hoover (April 21, 1924). For a broader perspective, consider TIME’s first fifty- four years of publication, from 1923 to 1977. Towards the end of these years, second wave feminism began to have an appreciable impact on the portrayal of women in the mainstream media. Yet in these fifty-four years, only 350 of 3336 covers, or 10.5%, were held by women, less than one a year. Only four women held the cover more than four times during these years: Queen Elizabeth II, Eleanor Roosevelt, Pat Nixon, and Betty Ford. Unsurprisingly, these women attained this status through marriage or birth. By contrast, the men on the cover of TIME were usually featured by virtues of their own achievements. Which writers did TIME designate the most important people of week? Writers were pictured on 90 of the first 3336 covers: 2.7%. Of these 90 covers, eight are held by women: 8.9%. Thirty-seven of the ninety writers earned the cover of TIME as novelists, three of whom were women: (1) the romance novelist Kathleen Norris (Jan 28, 1935); (2) Willa Cather (Aug 3, 1931); and (3) Virginia Woolf (April 12, 1937). Eleven of the ninety writers were poets, two of whom were women: (4) the proto-modernist Amy Lowell (March 2, 1925); and (5) Phyllis McGinley (June 18, 1965), who wrote light verse on married life in suburbia, and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1961. Fifteen of the ninety writers were playwrights, one of whom was a woman: (6) Jean Kerr (April 14, 1961). (Kerr won the cover for her play Mary, Mary, but she is best known today for the essay collection Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957), which became a 1960 cinematic vehicle for Doris Day.). The twenty remaining writers were featured for memoir and non- 399 fiction. There were two women among them: (7) Rebecca West (Dec. 8, 1947), a modernist best known then and today for Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1945), a history, travelogue, and analysis of Yugoslavia; and (8), Gertrude Stein (September 11, 1933), who earned the cover of TIME for The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (1933). 65 At first glance, this selection of women seems arbitrary. There are only three unarguably canonical writers on the cover of TIME—Cather, Woolf, and Stein—and two from the midlist—Lowell and West. The rest are largely unknown today. Nonetheless, TIME knew its business, and picked writers whom its public was certain to know and be sufficiently interested in to buy the magazine. Kathleen Norris, for instance, won the cover for the publication of her fiftieth romance novel, Woman in Love. TIME claimed that she was the best-paid working woman in the United States, at $300,000 a year (“Golden Honeymoon”). When Jean Kerr won the cover, her play Mary, Mary (1961) had just broken the record for the longest-running non-musical play on Broadway at 1500 performances (“Children Run Longer Than Plays”). And though there seems to have been no precipitating event behind Phyllis McGinley’s cover besides her lunch at the White House with President Johnson, TIME does make her and her work as representative of current opposition to Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963): “The strength of Phyllis McGinley’s appeal can best be measured by the fact that today, almost by inadvertence, she finds herself the sturdiest exponent of the glory of housewifery standing alone against a rising chorus of voices summoning women away from the hearth” (“The Tell-Tale Hearth”). Furthermore, TIME had unusual latitude in terms of dating with all its cover stories on the arts; the editors could usually commission 400 and then hold them for a slow news week. This latitude gave the editors exceptional calculation and discretion in terms of whom they chose to showcase—which makes Stein’s cover all the more remarkable. A sophisticated analysis is unnecessary to determine that of these nine women, only Stein isn’t pictured by a traditionally respectable and feminine representation. Consider the women writers in order of appearance: (1) Amy Lowell (1925, fig. 38); (2) Willa Cather (1931, fig. 39); (3) Gertrude Stein (1933, fig. 40), (4) Kathleen Norris (1935, fig. 41); (5) Virginia Woolf (1937, fig. 42), (9) Rebecca West (1945, fig. 43), (8) Jean Kerr (1961, fig. 44); and (9) Phyllis McGinley (1965, fig. 45). Though Lowell, Cather, and Woolf all had extensive homoerotic experience, and though possibly Lowell and almost certainly Cather identified as lesbian, these women’s visual representations on the cover of TIME are unexceptionally feminine, as they usually were, at least in the public domain. Lowell and Cather sit with their long hair pinned up, Lowell reading in her rocking chair, Cather writing in a print housedress in a domestic setting. Woolf, in a tailored suit with a foulard bow, appears to lecture. West may be wearing Athena’s battle helmet, but she is also drinking tea. Kerr and McGinley are presented as privileged women with clothes and hair redolent of monied suburbs, and their cover stories clarify that they are neighbors in Larchmont, Connecticut. The one exception seems to be Norris, who is portrayed playing the part of “southern mountaineer white trash” in an amateur theatrical by the Palo Alto Community Players (“Golden Honeymoon”). Norris’s cover appears to be an elaborate joke on her readers and their expectations of her likeness to her romantic heroines. Nonetheless, TIME assures us that 401 Fig. 38: Amy Lowell Fig. 39: Willa Cather, photograph for cover of TIME. Fig. 40: Gertrude Stein Fig. 41: Kathleen Norris 402 Fig. 42: Virginia Woolf Fig. 43: Rebecca West Fig. 44: Jean Kerr Fig. 45: Phyllis McGinley 403 Norris more than adequately fulfills her domestic duties: she is “a dynamo of energy that can leap from typewriter to cooking pot to evening dress and back again, a wife, a mother, a chatelaine, all in one highly individual bundle” (“Golden Honeymoon”). Furthermore, Norris’s photograph may be striking in terms of class—especially before the cover story reveals the joke—but is entirely traditional in terms of gender roles. Norris may be pictured as the Granny Diogenes of Appalachia, but she is still a recognizable female stereotype. Stein falls off the bell curve drawn by these nine women. Her hair, body, and clothes are all astonishing in terms of Time until at least 1975. 66 A casual viewer would not need to read the article or know anything about Stein to be taken aback by the gender presentation in this photograph, or for it to register as homoerotic in a culture that equated homosexuality with assuming characteristics of the opposite gender. If casual viewers did read the cover story, however, they would find the broadly queer aspects of Stein’s persona that not only permitted but also almost mandated this display for a celebrity who was celebrated for her visual oddness. All the aspects of Stein’s public persona that were present in “A Zolaesque American” in 1909 are present: her French residence and Jewishness, her association with visual modernism, her bulk and its un-feminine presentation. Agee notes Stein’s ethnicity and expatriatism early in the article: Gertrude Stein hates to be called an expatriate, in spite of the fact that she has lived most of her adult life in France and seems to be settled there. Born in Allegheny, Pa. (then a suburb of Pittsburgh) “of a very respectable middle class family” of German Jews, she was taken abroad at an early age. (57, quotation marks Agee) 404 Agee pays particular attention to Stein’s looks. As we have seen, he begins “Stein’s Way” by comparing her to a mountain. Later, Agee brings his description down to earth with a description that unusually unflattering for TIME: “Never a beauty, she is now massive, middle-aged, 59, would strongly resemble a fat Jewish hausfrau were it not for her close-cropped head” (59). Note, however, that Agee is careful not to overtly call Stein masculine, as this would overstep the acceptable bounds of broad queerness. Stein’s association with visual modernism—and through it, with incomprehensibility and ridiculousness—is referenced at the very start of the article, which has an epigraph in the form of a limerick that associates Stein with two other figures who were widely viewed as incomprehensible though perhaps brilliant: the physicist Albert Einstein and the sculptor Jacob Epstein, below incorrectly referenced by “Ed” instead of “Ep.” 67 The epigraph serves double duty as yet another sign of Stein’s Jewishness: I don’t like the family Stein There is Gert, there is Ed, there is Ein; Gert’s poems are bunk, Ed’s statues are punk, And nobody understands Ein. (57) Agee clarifies Stein’s relation with the art world later in the article, but he spends considerably more time on how she has been perceived as nonsensical: Who & What is Gertrude Stein? “Widely ridiculed and seldom enjoyed,” she is one of the least-read and most-publicized writers of the day. Her incomprehensible sentences, in which an infuriating glimmer of shrewd sense or subacid humor is sometimes discernible, have generated the spark for many a journalistic wisecrack; except to the adventurous few who have been hardy enough to read her in the original (and to some of those) she has the reputation of a pure nonsense writer. To the man-in-the-street, she is the synonym for what 405 Critic Max Eastman calls “the cult of unintelligibility.” In man-in-the-street lingo, “Gert's poems are bunk.” 68 (57, original formatting) Agee positions Stein’s history and reputation against the “perfectly comprehensible, eminently readable memoir” that drew TIME’s interest (57). Agee also positions Stein’s respectability against her broad queerness, and illustrates how this respectability is— somewhat paradoxically—the result of Stein’s durability in the avant-garde: “By the time-honored process of getting older, Gertrude Stein, though she remains as mysterious as ever, has made herself a background place in the literary panorama” (57). In Agee’s article, we see that though Stein’s public persona shifts in important ways after the publication of Autobiography, these new senses of Stein don’t replace the previous three decades of Stein. Instead, they deposit a new layer of strata that both obscures and is shaped by the previous public persona. Most importantly for our purposes here, “Stein’s Way” illustrates how Stein’s broad queerness both signifies her specific homosexuality and offers sufficient freedom for it to be adumbrated. Agee includes a number of signifiers of specific lesbianism that may be read by those with insight into homosexual desire and its formation. The title itself—“Stein’s Way”—is a pun of Swann’s Way (1913) the first volume in the series Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927) by Marcel Proust, which was first translated into English in 1922, and published in the United States in 1925. Swann’s Way, like The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, is a memoir that has been thoroughly mixed by its author, in part to disguise his own homosexuality—a homosexuality that is still very much present in the text. In addition, female homosexuality is a prominent feature of Proust’s work, as Proust often switched the genders of the models for Remembrance of 406 Things Past. Furthermore, Proust and his work shared with Stein and her work the nexus of extremely high culture, Frenchness, Jewish identity, the fin de siècle, and being more talked about than read. Agee also provides a number of clues to the nature of Stein and Toklas’s relationship. He specifies the length and strength of their relation: No fancy figment but a real live companion-secretary, Alice B. Toklas is a Californian (her father was a Pole) who has lived with Gertrude Stein for the last 26 years. Authoress Stein says she often urged Companion Toklas to write her autobiography, finally decided to do it for her. (57) Agee, paraphrasing from The Autobiography, also relates how when Toklas met Stein, “a bell rang.” This cliché was and is frequently used to denote a visceral response to stimulus, as suits the expression’s probable origin in the story of the dogs of behavioral psychologist Ivan Pavlov, who was offered food to the accompaniment of a bell until a bell alone could make the dogs slaver. Agee, following The Autobiography, accounts for this ringing by Toklas’s intuition that Stein was “a genius.” Yet the other lesbian signifiers in the quote, such as “unattached spinster,” as well as the sense of “genius” as something that was fabulous, extraordinary, and not to be measured by customary lengths, offer ample opportunity for Toklas’s visceral response to Stein to be read as attraction. Agee also offers evidence that this attraction became love, and then domesticity: “When Miss Toklas, unattached spinster with artistic leanings, met Gertrude Stein in Paris (1907) she immediately recognized a genius….They set up house together, at No. 27 Rue de Fleurus, have been together ever since” (57). The above quote is as close to a positive and, more importantly, visible vision of a lesbian couple in 1933 that a lesbian or gay adolescent growing up outside of an urban 407 center was likely to see. Agee goes further in describing Stein’s sexuality, however. He closes the article with a three-part hint: the observation that Stein “hardly mentions” love, the mention of an unnamed adolescent torment, and the reference of unmentionable privacies. Though Agee never directly states that Stein is a lesbian, and though adequate room is left for other interpretations of Stein’s biography, a more explicit mention of female homosexuality is difficult to imagine in a cover story of TIME in the first half of the twentieth century: It is a strangely impersonal book. Her only reference to her interior life is the admission that when she was 17, “the last few years had been lonesome ones and had been passed in an agony of adolescence.” If curious readers wonder why she passes over these matters so lightly, they may answer themselves by reflecting that no doubt Gertrude Stein, like everyone else, has autobiographical passages which she does not choose to run. (59) Q. E. D.: Stein’s specific homosexuality fuels the broad queerness that makes her fascinating to the public, and this same broad queerness allows an unusually frank display of Stein’s homosexuality without incurring censorship or disgust. An Unholy Union: Conclusion to the Dissertation The broad queerness of Gertrude Stein’s public persona collaborated with the historic invisibility of lesbians in the public eye to allow for Stein’s depiction of a lesbian domestic partnership in The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas. The homophobic censure and censorship otherwise endemic to 1933 was therefore avoided at the same time that a blatant written and visual description of a female same-sex relationship was offered to the mass public and digested by those who cared to see it. 408 Today, an obscuring scrim is still in place around the direct representation of lesbianism in The Autobiography and the rest of Stein’s prose. To an extent, the importance of Stein to lesbian history and iconography disguises the improbability of The Autobiography’s public success. It’s hard to pay particular attention to what seems so obvious, even if the “obvious” hasn’t yet been properly stated. In large part, however, the scrim around Stein is evidence of how easily Stein’s specific lesbianism remains easily lost in the canvas of her broad queerness. The scrim is also proof of the continued intangibility of the apparitional lesbian. And so Stein’s groundbreaking representation of female same-sexuality in Three Lives (1909) is ignored while brilliant scholars conduct indirect readings of lesbianism in Stein’s work, or of other aspects of her work altogether. True: Readers can and do turn the scrim around Stein transparent by reading her through the light of their interest in homosexuality, as readers have throughout the ninety-nine years that Stein has been in print. Nonetheless, most critics of Stein, both in the popular and the academic press, confine their attention to Stein’s homosexuality to her biography—and then only to the particulars of her personal life. For instance, they tend to elide how Stein, both before and after her death, was important to other gay women and men as much because she was a homosexual as because she was a writer. They tend not to mention how she was fundamental to various incarnations of gay liberation. Critical attention to lesbianism within Stein’s texts is even more glancing, restricted either to lip service or a theoretical abstraction. Consider, for instance, Janet Malcolm’s recent reconsideration of Stein and Toklas in the New Yorker in 2006, expanded and published as Two Lives: Gertrude and 409 Alice in 2007. At the center of Two Lives is the question of how Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas kept up their ménage in Nazi-occupied France despite their Judaism, their homosexuality, their American citizenship, their association with the avant-garde, and their history of not only being the enemy but of actively helping the enemy’s war effort. This question has been a reliable source of fascination for both the public and the academy for more than fifty years, and Malcolm offers a clear-eyed, unromantic view of the less savory aspects of Stein and Toklas’s survival—of, specifically, their close friendship with Bernard Fäy, the head of the Bibliothèque National under Pétain, and the cause for the transport of hundreds of Jews to concentration camps. Malcolm is a successful, well-respected literary journalist who has wrested impressive headlines and scandal by overturning conventional truths and peeling back the respectable façades of figures and systems associated with high culture. Her usual technique is to pick a representative conflict of a medium or field with cultural cachet— such as photography, psychoanalysis, and the legal system—and use it to anchor a meditation on narrative within this medium or field. 69 For instance, in The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Malcolm uses the fraught relationship of Joe McGinniss, author of the non-fiction “true crime” book Fatal Vision, and Jeffrey McDonald, the subject of McGinniss’s book, as an example of her theories on the relationship between journalist and subject. Malcolm’s coupling of sophisticated analysis with the pugnacious exposure of unexpected and unflattering aspects of her subject can make her writing viscerally exciting. For example, she exposed the scandalous, determinedly unsedate culture of the upper echelons of psychoanalysis in her In the Freud Archives (1984), and she contested 410 the usual narrative of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, where callous Ted drives a saintly, beleaguered Sylvia to her death, in The Silent Woman (1994). More recently, Malcolm turned her exacting attention to Stein and Toklas. Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice was well-received throughout the upper half of the mass media, and was selected as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2007 by the New York Times as well as a Best Book of 2007 by Entertainment Weekly: an impressive combination. Yet despite all Malcolm’s history of exposing the “secrets” of a field of inquiry, Two Lives is relentlessly conventional in its treatment of Stein, Toklas, and homosexuality. For instance, Malcolm wonders about the close, long-lasting friendship among Stein, Toklas, and Fäy, and finds no reasons for their bond besides expedience. It never occurs to her that Fäy’s homosexuality may have served as a bond between him, Stein, and Toklas. Indeed, though Malcolm (like many of Stein’s biographers and critics) notes the frequency with which Stein and Toklas befriended attractive, artsy young men, she (unlike many of Stein’s biographers and critics) makes no note of these young men’s frequent homosexuality, and how this homosexuality may have provided part of that attraction via an identitarian bond. Malcolm’s neglect of this detail is repeated on a larger scale throughout Two Lives, whose primary concerns besides Stein and Toklas’s survival in Vichy France are (1) a portrait and history of Stein scholarship through encounters with several leading Stein scholars, (2) the phenomenon of The Making of Americans as an unread yet canonical modernist text, and (3) the history of Toklas after Stein’s death. Despite the focus of Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice on its titular subjects, Malcolm never discusses 411 Stein and Toklas’s sexuality as an identity category with bearing on their lives. She is forthright about details of the women’s domestic and sexual relationship but never considers how the fact that Stein and Toklas were two women engaged in a homosexual relationship affected their senses of self, their daily activities, their decisions in the long and short terms, their aesthetic choices and proclivities, or the composition of their circle of friends and their estrangement with their biological families. The title of Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, which promises to present Stein and Toklas as a couple, is misleading. No matter what her particular object of concern, Malcolm determinedly ignores the relevance of homosexuality and the impact of homophobia upon the subjects of her analysis. For instance, Malcolm’s discussion of Stein’s unpublished first novel, Q. E. D., lacks any consideration of how homophobia affected both the novel’s publication history and its story of a nascent lesbian struggling to solidify her identity and happiness (61). Malcolm is very interested in Toklas’s violent reaction to discovering the manuscript and Stein’s previous relationship with May Bookstaver, which Stein drew upon for Q. E. D., but Malcolm does not ask how the social and psychic construction of female homosexuality helped configure this epic fight between Stein and Toklas. Similarly, Malcolm’s discussion of how Stein abandons conventional narrative while writing The Making of Americans lacks any commentary on how the difficulty of publishing realist work on female homosexuality may have affected her aesthetic trajectory and heightened her turn to a more experimental style (156). 412 By contrast, Malcolm spends considerable time on a carefully modulated discussion of Stein and Toklas’s complicated relationship with Judaism. Certainly Stein and Toklas were Jews, and their Jewishness affected many aspects of their lives. But Stein and Toklas’s Jewishness was not more immediate to their daily experience than their homosexuality, which they “practiced” much more than the ethnicity, religion, and culture they were born into. 70 The specifics of Vichy France did not change this equation. Considerable numbers of homosexuals were transported to camps from Vichy France, and though lesbians were less visible than gay men, gay women were also transported and killed. And Toklas and Stein were unusually visible, as the fame of their domestic partnership cancelled some of the usual intangibility of lesbian relationships in the public eye. Malcolm writes that, in Wars I Have Seen (1945), Stein’s memoir of the war years, Stein “just can’t seem to bring herself to say that she and Toklas are Jewish” (79). Why is this worth Malcolm’s attention, and not Stein’s equal inability to bring herself to say that she and Toklas are lovers? Why does Malcolm consistently showcase Stein’s anxiety about her ethnicity, but not her anxiety about her sexuality? What about the contradiction between Stein’s careful delineation of her partnership with Toklas in her work and her decision to never directly name it as sexual in all of her memoirs? There are three possible reasons for Malcolm’s elision, all of which I have addressed in various forms throughout Chapters 3, 4, and 5. First, Malcolm’s admirable desire to cover new ground may have led her to falsely consider Stein and Toklas’s relationship as old news, too “done” to deserve her attention. Second, Malcolm may take a “queer” perspective on Stein and Toklas’s relationship. She may acknowledge that the 413 two women were erotically and domestically partnered but conclude that this partnering was done outside the context of a homosexual identity and without a substantive relationship to broad cultural understanding of same-sexuality. This assertion is questionable for most of the twentieth century. 71 Last, Malcolm, despite her critical bona fides, may be transfixed by the unholy union of the apparitional lesbian with the nexus of the specifically lesbian and the broadly queer. Like so many before her, she may be blinded by the coupling. The above complaints make a narrow critique of Malcolm, who has the right to determine the parameters of her work. 72 Her decision to consider Stein and Toklas’s homosexuality irrelevant may be questionable but does not necessarily lessen the value of what she does do. Malcolm’s elision is important, however, because it bears witness to the continued power of Stein’s homosexuality to fly beneath the radar, despite her importance as a lesbian icon and her status as the most famous and respected lesbian American author of the twentieth century. With Malcolm, as with other mainstream critics, lip service is paid, and then the subject is either abstracted or abandoned. These past three chapters have been an attempt to document this lack and how it diminishes our understanding of Stein and her corpus, as the first two chapters did with Capote. Only by addressing this missing element in the discussion of these authors’ life and work can the impact of their fabulous potency be seen, felt, and understood. 414 Endnotes for Chapter 5 1 The first British edition of Three Lives was composed of 300 copies left unsold from the first American edition. Only the second British edition required a new printing. For the publication history of Three Lives, see Chapter 3. 2 Publication details are compiled from the Wilson (1974) and Sawyer (1940) and bibliographies. The Wilson is more reliable in terms of both numbers and the material presentation of the editions, but the Sawyer has some useful material details. 3 These figures exclude deluxe editions of ten or less. 4 Reviews of Three Lives are discussed in Chapter 3. 5 See Barbara Will, “Gertrude Stein and Zionism” for Stein’s relation to her ethnicity. 6 For instance, Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, one of the first countries to require Jewish surnames from a pre-approved list, commonly misread the law as requiring specifically German names. Cf. Gold, in Hanks. 7 Cf. Chapter 4, note 3. 8 Emanuela Gutkowski disagrees in her article “Gertrude Stein and Jules Laforgue: a Comparative Approach”: “Critics have so far agreed that Laforgue actually never wrote this sentence. We think, on the contrary, that the sentence could have been inspired by a very similar one included in Laforgue’s Moralité Légendaires, and that Gertrude Stein could have had various reasons to quote this work.” 9 “Une nuit que j'étais près d'une affreuse Juive,/ Comme au long d'un cadavre un cadavre étendu,/ Je me pris à songer près de ce corps vendu/À la triste beauté dont mon désir se prive.” 10 Ah, the Jewish peddler! Strictly speaking, “peddled” is translator Agler’s, and not Baudelaire’s. The Jewish traffic in goods, however, is in the original text. Other midcentury ttransations of “d’une affreuse Juive” include “Beside the venal body I was buying” (Campbell), and “this foul bought body” (LeClercq). 11 Most notably, many of the women in Les Fleurs du Mal are modeled on Baudelaire’s Afro-Caribbean mistress Jeanne Duval, the model for “Le balcon,” “Parfum exotique,” “La chevelure,” “Sed non satiata,” “Le serpent qui danse,” and “Une charogne.” 12 Jonathan Freedman points out that Eliot’s reputation as an anti-semite is “rooted in the absolute preeminence Eliot assumed in the booming literary academy of the 1940s and 415 1950s, especially in America”—a rank that gave Eliot’s attitudes special weight (“Lessons” 2). For discussions of Eliot’s anti-semitism, see Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America; Cheyette, Constructions of "The Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945; and Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. For views of Eliot as not an anti-semite, see Schuchard, “Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar,” and the epilogue to Craig Rains’ T S Eliot. For a recent overview of the issue, see Modernism/modernity 10:3 (2003). 13 For the contemporary marketing of modernism, see “Modernism and Mass Culture, American Literary History 13.2 (2001): 342-5; Dettmar and Watts, eds., Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, and Morrisson, The Public Face of Modernism: Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905–1920. For the use of modernism as an à la mode marketing tool, see Rainey, Advertising Modernism, Literature, Advertisement, & Social Reading. For the interrelationship between Stein’s works in particular and mass culture see Alison Tischler’s very helpful “Steinian Modernism and Mass Culture.” All the above argue with the traditional view of high modernism as removed from the market, as instituted by Clement Greenberg in the 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” and reinstated by Andreas Huyssen in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (1986). 14 The Armory Show also coincided with the first purchase of a work of modernist art by the Metropolitan Museum: Cezanne’s “Hill of the Poor.” 15 “The Fighting 69 th ” was nicknamed by a chastened General Robert E. Lee after the Confederate Army lost the battle of Malvern Hill. In popular culture, the regiment— which has a long Irish heritage—is notable for traditionally leading the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York, and for its portrayal in the 1940 James Cagney movie The Fighting 69 th . 16 Mabel Garson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan (1896-1856) was born a Buffalo banking heiress and was a central figure in important artistic and political bohemian circles, several of which revolved around her, throughout her long and peripatetic life. Dodge met Gertrude Stein while living abroad, and Gertrude and Alice were her guests at the Villa Curonia, where Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia was written. Dodge was an active bisexual as a young woman, as detailed in her autobiography Intimate Memories (1933), but her and Stein’s relationship is usually interpreted as limited to friendship, flirtation, and patronage. This was Dodge’s status when she promoted Stein at the Armory Show. In 1912, Dodge returned to New York, where she hosted a Greenwich Village salon for artists and leftists. Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, John Reed (with whom Dodge became romantically involved) and Carl Van Vechten were regular guests at Dodge’s 416 salon, and Van Vechten would base the character Edith Dale in his novel Peter Whiffle on this incarnation of Dodge. 17 “Speculations, or Post Impressionism in Prose” also raised Dodge’s own profile insofar as she was occasionally mentioned in press accounts of the Armory Show. Dodge sustained a media presence through her writings for The Masses, a prominent left-wing arts and politics journal that was the precursor to The New Masses, and with a syndicated newspaper column on Freudian psychology that appeared in Hearst newspapers. 18 The twentieth-century Saturday Evening Post dates from 1897, when Cyrus H. K. Curtis bought the rights to an earlier incarnation of the Post, established in 1821. Curtis falsified a genealogy that made Ben Franklin the Post’s founder and its origin 1728. Curtis has an innovative business plan that tied profits to advertising rather than subscriptions, which kept the price of issues low. By 1908, the Post had a million subscribers, and by the 1920s, the Post earned more $50 million annually. See Cohn and Tebbel. 19 Middlebrow, yes; conservative, no. The politics of The Saturday Evening Post were broadly progressive until World War I, when the magazine became progressively more reactionary, leading to the contemporary understanding of the Post as a conservative redoubt. 20 For a prominent example of the genre of childish hijinks along the same lines and at the same period, see early installments of Our Gang/The Little Rascals (1922-1944). 21 In American slang of the 1910s, “It’s a bear” means “It’s great.” 22 Cf. Ellman 165-200. For instance, in The Washington Post of 21 Jan 1882, “a drawing of Wilde holding a sunflower was juxtaposed with one of a ‘citizen of Borneo' holding a coconut on its first page” (168). Note how Blythe repeats this move of paralleling the supposedly-advanced avant-garde with a more “primitive” people, in this case the French. 23 The Armory Show received its least sympathetic reviews in Boston, though it remained a popular success. Rogers offers an intelligent survey of modernism as it appears to a cogent cultural critic who was not personally connected to the movement, and who claims neither an attack, defense, or even an “explanation.” Instead, he sees the following: …[a] primer from which the reader may go on to link up these people and to see that all their ideas, expressed in different media and differently even in the same medium, are all founded in some first principle and tending in the same direction. And that direction is briefly, anarchy in the arts corresponding to the older and better-known idea of anarchy in society. (12) 417 24 The invaluable Curnett compilation The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein (2000) misprints the “Dime Bank Building” as the “Fime Bank Building” (14). This typo has spawned others. While the “Fime Bank Building” has no connotations that deepen the joke for readers of the Detroit News, the Dime Bank Building was the largest office building of its time, with 23 stories that contained 1000 offices. The joke is therefore explained: One would pull the Dime Bank building over oneself only if reading Tender Buttons were such a crushing experience that one sought relief in a literal crush. 25 A recent analogue is Sex by Madonna (1992), which was extraordinary both in terms of sales and in terms of media attention, and appealed to an audience that was predominantly interested in its association with its author, rather than its content. Despite 2 editions of 1.5 million (the first sold out 3 days after release), mint copies of Sex are currently (2008) very valuable, starting at $200 for the American and $400 for the Japanese edition. Though there are no official statistics for coffee table books, Sex is generally held to be the most successful ever released. 26 Sonnets from the Patagonian: the Street of Little Hotels (1914), by the owner and manager of Claire Marie press, the erotic poet Donald Evans, had pale blue-green boards with its title inked in red on the spine. Saloon Sonnets, properly subtitled with Sunday Flutings, by Allan Norton, was also published in 1914. Sacral Dimples: A Diary by Carl Van Vechten is announced in a Claire Marie publicity brochure but never appeared. I have found no trace of A Piety of Fans, but it may too have been a promised offering by Claire Marie. In short, Rogers offers an accurate portrait of the image Claire Marie sought to portray, if not of what it actually offered. 27 In The Autobiography, Stein references Dodge’s plans for her as providing luxury items to the most exclusive clientele: “[After paying for the printing of The Portrait of Mabel Dodge,] Mabel Dodge immediately conceived the idea that Gertrude Stein should be invited from one country house to another and do portraits and then end up doing portraits of american millionaires which would be a very exciting and lucrative career. Gertrude Stein laughed” (132). 28 Stein didn’t have the opportunity to be Broadwayish until the 1933 publication of The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, which made possible the 1934 Broadway production of her and Virgil Thompson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Whether being on Broadway was in this case “Broadwayish” is a question beyond my scope here. 29 Vélin d’Arches, Hollande van Gelder, and Imperial Japon are brands of fine paper. 30 “Relief Work In France” is included in the 1975 Stein anthology Reflection on the Atom Bomb (13), and “A League” is included in 1928 Stein anthology Useful Knowledge (84)—poor showings for two of Stein’s most widely-read poems during her lifetime. 418 31 After 1972, LIFE had a variety of incarnations—as a monthly, as an occasional “special issue,” and from 2004-2007, as a free Sunday newspaper supplement. 32 William Randolph Hearst was the son of George Hearst, whose gold, silver, and copper mines made him one of the most famous millionaires of his day, and who ended his life as a U.S. Senator. In 1887, William, then a twenty-four-year-old college student, asked his father to make him publisher of the San Francisco Examiner, which his father had won while gambling. The Examiner became successful due to Hearst’s exposés of municipal and corporate corruption (which extended to companies that the Hearsts had an interest in), crusades for civic improvement, and the liberal use of scandal and satire. Hearst’s standards and reputation suffered as he built a publishing empire that extended to twenty-eight newspapers by 1928. He would frequently undersell competitors until he drove them out of business, and his increased use of sensational and often false news items led him to be tagged as the father of “yellow journalism.” (Yellow journalism was named after the popular comic strip character “The Yellow Kid,” drawn in a variety of serials by Richard F. Outcault, whom Hearst wooed away from a competing paper.) Hearst’s most notorious stunt to increase circulation was the printing of misleading, inflammatory articles that were then (as now) believed to be a primary cause of the 1898 Spanish-American War. Hearst would also heavily guy the news printed by his papers to accord with his own political beliefs and ambitions to be a U.S. Representative (successful, 1903-7), Mayor of New York City, Governor of New York, and President of the United States (all failed). Life’s attacks on Hearst come during the period of his newspaper empire’s expansion. 33 Thomas Lansing Masson, a well-known humorist and novelist in his day, was literary editor of Life from 1893-1900 and managing editor until 1922. As he was not the sole editor at Life, I reference “the editors” rather than Masson throughout the chapter. 34 Richard Aldington was the primary writer of this anonymous preface. Ezra Pound, H. D., and Aldington (H. D.’s future husband) were the kernel of the Imagist movement, which for its time included an unusual number of women, many of whom, like H.D. and Amy Lowell, were lesbian or bisexual. Des Imagistes was first published as a special issue of The Glebe, a literary journal edited by Man Ray and Alfred Kreymborg. 35 The two clearest references that Stein makes to her Judaism are in her college essay “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation” (1896) and “The Reverie of the Zionist” (1920). A case can also be made that The Making of Americans remains in its final draft the history of a specifically Jewish-American family, though Stein whitewashes the Jewishness of earlier drafts out of the final version. As Barbara Will writes in "Gertrude Stein and Zionism" (2005) there is a “long tradition of critical silence surrounding Stein's Jewishness and its place in her aesthetic” (437). 419 Stein’s attitude towards her Jewishness was complex, and her public pronouncements on the subject were often ironic, as presumably was her May 6, 1934 pronouncement in the New York Times Magazine: Hitler ought to have the peace prize, because he is removing all the elements of contest and of struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left element, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace ... By suppressing Jews ... he was ending struggle in Germany. Toklas herself converted to Catholicism after Stein’s death. 36 Cf. Borges’s Chinese encyclopedia in his The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, as famously explicated by Foucault in The Order of Things. 37 When did sharp shock of modernism subside to the dry susurrus of piles of currency and pages assigned for homework? The most influential and important aspects of European modernism had all been configured by 1933, and were slowly matriculating to the universities and the market. The Museum of Modern Art was founded in 1929, and Cezanne and Picasso were almost entirely risk-free investments by 1933. (By contrast, the 1936 reviews of the Dada/Surrealism MoMA show questioned whether the Dadaists and Surrealists produced art.) Academic acceptance took longer. Alfred Barr, the director of MoMA, taught the first class in modern art in 1926, at Wellesley; Meyer Schapiro followed, at Columbia. In 1936, Barr made his famous chart of the “genealogy” of modern art, which helped discipline the subject. By 1939, Clement Greenberg is writing as if the avant-garde is as an old guard now under threat: “Picasso’s shows still draw crowds, and T. S. Eliot is taught in the universities; the dealers in modern art are still in business, and the publishers still publish some “difficult” poetry” (“Avant-garde and Kitsch” 1). 38 See Chapter 1 for an extended discussion of the connotations of the divan and the chaise longue in the context of Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Truman Capote’s mimicking of Olympia for the author photo of Other Voices, Other Rooms (1947). 39 An overview of terms for the period that spanned the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—fin de siècle, la belle époque, the gilded age, the gay nineties, and the mauve decade—and the relation of those terms to homosexuality and Stein may be useful. “Fin de siècle” is French for the “end of the century,” and usually denotes the cultural production of the years between 1880 and 1914, the start of World War I. These years see a transition between the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of modernism, and contain two primary cultural movements: realism/naturalism and decadence, which repudiate the mores and proprieties of the Victorian era in different ways. Fin de siècle is much more associated with decadence than realism, and is most properly used in reference to French artists, especially the Symbolists (Baudelaire, Mallarmé) and the movements heavily influenced by them, such as Aestheticism in 420 Britain (Wilde, Swinburne). More broadly speaking, the term can characterize anything that is simultaneously decadent, opulent, and doomed—and through decadent and doomed, homosexual, as it was then understood. I use fin de siècle in terms of Stein because her French residence is so important to her pubic persona, and because she is so frequently configured along decadent lines. La Belle Époque—French for the “Beautiful Era”—dates from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the start of World War I; roughly the same time period as the fin de siècle, with an extra ten years tacked on at the beginning. The term “belle époque” is not usually employed to discuss the cultural production of this period but rather is associated with the unusual political peace within and between France, Germany, and Britain, which led to a period of stability and prosperity, especially for the upper classes. Those who survived World War I tended to romanticize the pre-war period, and elide its tensions: the belle époque was not considered so belle while it was underway. In the United States, the years between Reconstruction (1863-1877) and the economic depression of the Panic of 1893 (and, sometimes, until the end of the century) is denoted by “The Gilded Age,” which derives from the novel of that name by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). The novel details the financial excess and social corruption rampant after the Civil War. The term The Gay Nineties originated in the United States in the 1920s, and was either created or popularized by Richard V. Culter’s series of drawings by that name in Life, later collected into a book of that name (1928). “The Gay Nineties” references the carefree, extravagant life of the upper classes during the 1890s; the term presupposes an inaccurately golden image of the final years of the Gilded Age. In terms of idealization, it is similar to La Belle Époque. The “gay” in “Gay Nineties” does not reference homosexuality. A contemporary name for the 1890s is the “Mauve Decade,” which was English in origin. The Mauve Decade is named for William Henry Perkin’s discovery of aniline dyes, the first of which was mauveine, which led to the widespread employment of mauve in fashion. Mauve would operate as a signifier for homosexuality until it was overtaken by lavender and then pink later in the century. This signification has pushed the connotations of the Mauve Decade heavily towards Aesthetic icons such as Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, with whom the terms was less associated when it was first in use. 40 The inherent sexuality of an en-couched languid woman is discussed in Chapter 1. 41 Opium was made illegal; laudanum, a liquid preparation of opium and alcohol, was not. As whites tended to use laudanum and those with Chinese ancestry to tended to smoke opium, the prohibition of opium had racist overtones. This racism was informed by the corona of the foreign and exotic around smoking opium. This is the corona that Stein wears in the fantasy of her smoking. She is not queen of laudanum! 421 42 State regulation of cannabis began in 1906 and steadily grew through the 1910s. The United States supported the regulation of hashish—then known as “Indian hemp” as opposed to “European hemp”—in the International Opium Convention in 1925. 1925 also saw the passage of the Uniform State Narcotic Art, which attempted to make marijuana regulation uniform throughout the States. Cannabis came under increased scrutiny in 1930 with the establishment of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics as part of a federal push to regulate and outlaw such drugs. Marijuana was further regulated and criminalized by the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act. 43 Anderson was born in a small town in Ohio in 1876 to an alcoholic father who couldn’t keep a job and frequently moved his family. He left school at 14 to work as a laborer and a soldier before attending college and becoming an advertising copywriter. Anderson published his first novel in 1916, at the age of 40. Richard Wright was raised by his mother and at times in an orphanage; his formal schooling stopped at grade school. At 19, Wright moved to Chicago, where he became seriously involved with the Communist party and moved in bohemian circles. He later moved to New York City, where he published his first short-story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, in 1938. Disgusted by American racism, Wright moved to France in 1946, where he eventually settled permanently and became a French citizen. For a reading of Stein’s influence on Wright, cf. Weiss. 44 James Agee quotes Anderson’s configuration of Grandma Stein in “Stein’s Way” (1933), discussed later in this chapter. 45 Colette offers a contemporary’s account of Vivien and the larger expatriate lesbian community in The Pure and the Impure (1933). For a scholarly account of the expatriate lesbian community, see Benstock, Women. 46 Cf. Halberstam. 47 The power of this association overwhelmed the actual material circumstances of lesbian subcultures in Paris. The documentation of a healthy working-class lesbian culture by the photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournacho) illustrates that there were just as many (if not more) working-class lesbian bars in Paris at the start of the 20 th century as there were salons frequented by heiresses and aristocrats. Without the documentation of Nadar’s archive, the current perception of lesbian Paris at the start of the twentieth century would have been largely configured by bohemia and wealth. 48 By contrast, the Soviet avant-garde movement did not conflict with state policy until 1932, when the Party began to support Socialist Realism. This heightened the opposition of communists in the United States to non-representational art. 422 49 This narrow view of art, coupled with the racism that permeated parts of the party, led to Wright’s public falling out with the party after his move from Chicago to New York in 1937, where the white communists who had offered to find him housing withdrew their offer when they found out he was black, and where black communists condemned him as a bourgeois intellectual. Cf. Wright, The God That Failed. 50 For Stein’s economic history, cf. Bridgman, Brinnin, Hobhouse, Mellow, Wagner- Martin, and Wineapple. 51 Out of context, Wright’s story of Stein and the Stockyard Workers may read as a parody. The depth of Wright’s commitment to the Communist Part contraindicates this; he writes in earnest. 52 Gold was strongly homophobic and frequently attacked the “inappropriate” masculinity and sexuality of writers and writing that he didn’t like in his reviews. Cf. Penner, Pinks, Pansies, and Punks (2005). 53 Cf. Tischler 17-21 for an overview of Marquis’ parodies of Stein. Tischler reads several of Marquis’s stand-alone parodies of Stein, and notes that Marquis “grasped the principles of Steinian abstraction”—which he mocked (17). Tischler discusses archy and mehitabel and the Hermione poems but does not consider how the latter references decadence, which is outside her scope. 54 Tischler continues: This refusal to provide a plain response to the “Puzzled Reader” was motivated, most likely, by Marquis’s desire to poke fun at both Stein and his Greenwich Village characters. However, despite these intentions, his circular response fueled his readers’ interest in Stein. Readers continued to write letters with questions about Stein and even contributed their own renditions of her writing style with the hope that they would be printed in the column. (20-21) Tischler found her version of the poem in the Beinecke Stein archives. The poem I quote from appeared in the New York Sun, where it was published. Marquis frequently republished his newspaper columns in a variety of forms. 55 The closest Stein comes to reclining in the 360 photographs in the Stendahl is in an anonymous photo taken in 1902 or 1903 (31), a photo by Alvin Langdon Coburn, probably from 1914 (74), and especially a press photo from the mid-1930s (187). Even these three photos are far, far removed from an odalisque. 56 Agee is best known today for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his collaboration with the photographer Walter Evans. The quotation from Agee has a typo: a close quote at the end of the sentence (after “read”) but no open quote, which makes it 423 possible that Agee quotes someone who was de-credited through typographic or editorial error. 57 Ernest Hemingway writes in A Moveable Feast (published posthumously, in 1964) that Stein “got to look like a Roman emperor and that was fine if you liked your women to look like Roman emperors” (123). 58 Several critics have noted in passing that Stein does seems like she is in drag when she wears what appears to be “inappropriately” feminine clothes, like the flowered blouse in fig. 31, or the high-femme hats with which she sometimes set off her masculine outfits. This may be the result of Stein’s current celebrity persona; said blouse would probably seem “natural” to a casual, contemporary observer. Such items in Stein’s wardrobe would be comparatively invisible, as they were expected, unlike her more “masculine” clothes. 59 The Oscar nominations were for Best Actress (Dietrich), Best Director (Josef von Sternberg), Best Art Direction, and Best Cinematography. To figure how much a box office of 2 million would be worth in contemporary dollars, I compared the percentage of the total box office (123 million) that 2 million was in 1930 (1.63%), and then applied that percentage to the 2007 box office ($9, 657 million). My reasoning was that this would be a more accurate number than simply adjusting for inflation, due to changes in the global reach of the industry. 60 The growing importance of sound film at the end of the 1920s led to greater calls for government censorship, which the film industry avoided by censoring itself. The Hays Code was adopted in 1930 but not enforced until the Production Code Administration was created in 1934. These four years are known as “the pre-code era,” which saw such racy films as Mae West’s I’m No Angel and Barbara Stanwyck’s Baby Face, both successes in 1933. Nonetheless, local censorship boards and religious groups had considerable influence before 1934, and so censorship was still practiced both inside and outside the studios. 61 The full profile portrait not only puts the subject at a psychological distance from its audience but also tends to make her less attractive. The full profile accentuates facial irregularity and details such as sunken cheeks and big noses and ears, while the more common three-quarters view hides asymmetry and tends to be more flattering. Yet this calculus doesn’t seem to hold for Stein; to these eyes, at least, Stein’s face in full profile seems to gain grandeur. 62 All statistics on TIME are gathered either from Lehnus, Who’s on TIME? (1980) or the TIME official website, <http://www.time.com>. 424 63 For example, Henry Luce, one of the founders of TIME, was a prominent Republican and anti-Communist who, both directly through his party influence and indirectly through his publications, was integral to the securing of American support for Chiang Kai-Cheng, Soong May-Ling, and the Nationalist Chinese during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. 64 Hadden died in 1929, but Luce maintained TIME’s format as he built an empire of periodicals that included Life, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated; he remained editor- in-chief of these and other magazines until 1964. 65 I have not included Ève Curie Labouisse in this list, who won the cover of TIME (Feb 12, 1940) in part for Madame Curie (1937), the biography of her mother Marie Curie. Both Curie’s French nationality, her status as a celebrity by virtue of her beauty as a young woman (she was known as “the girl with the radium eyes”), her career as a concert pianist, and her relation to her husband (U.S. ambassador to Greece) and mother and sister (both winners of a Nobel prize for chemistry) significantly differentiate her from the other women writers on the list. In short, she wasn’t a woman writer, but a famous woman who wrote. More precisely, she was a woman writer—after the war, she was a respected journalist in Europe—but her writing didn’t get her the cover. All that said, Curie Labouisse’s cover photograph is very much of a piece with the rest of the women’s, except for Stein. 66 For that matter, Stein offers a more manly image than the cross-gendered and much- ballyhooed image of Annie Lennox on the cover of the January 23, 1984 Newsweek, Time’s cognate, more than fifty years later. 67 There is no “Ed Stein,” as exhibited by an editorial response on September 18, 1933: A child of error and perversity, Ed Stein was a non-existent character who appeared on Earth just long enough to make TIME, Sept. 11. p. 57, a horrid sight and, but for the intervention of the Blue Eagle, to cost several proofreaders and makeup editors their jobs. The Stein whose place he usurped in the limerick is, of course, Sculptor Jacob (“Ep”) Epstein, creator of primordial monuments in London. — ED. (original formatting) 68 Eastman was an important leftist critic in the 1910s and an editor of The Masses from 1913 until the government forced the journal to close in 1918. Eastman was therefore the editorial forebear of Michael Gold, editor of The New Masses. Unsurprisingly, Eastman’s “cult of nonsense” is related to Gold’s criticism of Stein as nonsensical babbler, detailed earlier in the chapter. 69 Malcolm’s major works include her debut, Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography (1980); Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), an investigation of the culture and lived experience of psychoanalysts; In the Freud Archives (1984), which investigates the tenure of Jeffrey Masson as director of the archives and his claim 425 that Freud’s “seduction theory”—the belief that neuroses stemmed from the actual sexual abuse of children, which Freud later abandoned—invalidated most psychoanalytic theory; The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), detailed above; The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (1994), which used the history of Plath and Hughes to investigate the medium of literary biography; and The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999), which uses the case of an overzealous lawyer to offer a critique of the legal system. Malcolm’s books are usually first published at least in part as essays in The New Yorker, and then revised. Two of Malcolm’s husbands held editorial positions with The New Yorker, which in addition to her own talents, helped her place her work with the magazine. Malcolm herself became publicly known when she and The New Yorker were sued for libel by Jeffrey Masson. Malcolm could not produce tape recordings of the quotes Masson claimed she fabricated for In the Freud Archives, and the case went to the Supreme Court before Malcolm was found innocent in 1994. In 1995, she swore in an affidavit that she had found the misplaced notebooks that proved that Masson, indeed, said the disputed quotes. 70 In her focus on Stein’s Jewish identity, Malcolm also discounts the considerable role of Stein and Toklas’s identification and patriotism for France, which certainly affected their decisions during the war. Stein and Toklas had worked hard to defend La France and what were seen as the “defenseless little countries” of Europe against Germany in the last World War; running away in this World War would be an abandonment of an important part of their identity—an abandonment that millions of Jews throughout Europe refused to make. 71 Some of the most important work in queer and GLBT studies concerns same-sexuality outside the context of gay and lesbian identity in twentieth-century America. Yet works such as George Chauncey’s Gay New York and Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, even as they produce examples of men and women who don’t fit “standard” formulations of sexual identity, nonetheless do not claim that these standards were irrelevant. 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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Creator Solomon, Jeffrey Michael (author)

Core Title Fabulous potency: Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote, authorial personae, and homosexual identity from the Wilde trials to Stonewall

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 12/15/2010

Defense Date 09/29/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag advertising,Armory Show,author celebrity,author photographs,authorial fame,authorial persona,canon formation,Gay authors,gay celebrity,gay literature,gay modernism,Gertrude Stein,homosexuality and modernism,homosexuality and naturalism,homosexuality in literature,Lesbian authors,lesbian literature,Life magazine,literary cachet,literary reception,OAI-PMH Harvest,Other Voices, Other Rooms,publishing,Three Lives,Time magazine,Truman Capote

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Boone, Joseph Allen (committee member), Friedberg, Anne (committee member), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Modleski, Tania (committee member)

Creator Email jefsolo@gmail.com,jsolomon@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m1924

Unique identifier UC1127847

Identifier etd-Solomon-2503 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-156090 (legacy record id),usctheses-m1924 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Solomon-2503.pdf

Dmrecord 156090

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Solomon, Jeffrey Michael

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu