The Once and Future Genius

Summary

It’s not often that a biography really gets going after the author has reached the subject’s death. Gertrude Stein herself predicted that she would only be understood in the future: ‘For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.’ She wasn’t entirely right, but Francesca Wade’s new ‘afterlife’ of Stein takes the sentiment seriously. The revolutions in language that preoccupied Stein in life were slowly appreciated after her death in 1946. Despite having an unpromising cast of scholars, librarians, publishers and fans, Wade turns the posthumous half of the Stein story into a narrative of suppression, revelation and hopes fulfilled. It helps that there is romance at the heart of it, and a secret notebook. First, the story of Stein’s life must be told. The myth of Stein, her Parisian salon and her collection of modernist art is immense; Stein scholarship is even bigger. In this inflated scene, Wade’s is a sensitive, compelling study that – like her debut, Square Haunting, a group biography of four women writers living in the same London square – puts writing at the centre of her subject’s world. Her Stein is charming, self-important, eccentric, vulnerable and obsessive, driven to understand her own interests but not always understanding others’. Stein’s preoccupation with knowledge began early. Studying psychology with William James, she discovered an interest in the mind and perception. On a trip to London in 1902 – her freedom to travel and write was supported by an allowance from a wealthy brother – she spent five months in the British Museum, reading her way through centuries of English literature. Stein thought literature should study people’s essential character, what she called their ‘bottom nature’. Her first and most monumental innovation, The Making of Americans, begun in 1903 in Paris, is a ‘complete history of everyone’ – purposely repetitive, without a plot but pulsing with the lives of its characters. It i...