No Modernism Without Lesbians by Diana Souhami (latest books to read txt) 📕

that she could not do that thing, that always she was not, as he put it, ever thorough in anything.

Mostly he took no notice of her and she did what she liked. But then capriciously he would say she must not go out that evening, she must stay in the house with her mother. Gertrude, he told Leo, was his responsibility:

You have to take care of her sometime and you might as well begin, the sooner the better. You will have to do it sooner or later I tell you.

Gertrude, though uninteresting to her father, chose to become interesting to herself. And she was the centre of Alice B. Toklas’s universe.

Daniel Stein married Amelia Keyser, ‘a sweet gentle little woman’, in 1864 soon after their first meeting. She was twenty-one, he was ten years older. One of his brothers arranged the marriage. Sometimes, said Gertrude, her father thought his wife was a flower; usually he forgot she existed. She called him Darling Dan or Dear Dan in her diaries and worried about his moods, his travels away from home and his health.

In her turn, Gertrude dedicated her books to DD, her Darling Darling, her Alice B. Toklas, her spouse in all ways but the law of any land.

Amelia was a good wife, an efficient housekeeper and the mother of nice children. She sewed, cooked and polished. Leo said she only read two books in her life: Home Influence: A Tale for Mothers and Daughters and The Mother’s Recompense, both by a Sephardic Jewish novelist, Grace Aguilar, who settled in Hackney in London. He never saw his father read a book of any sort.

Gertrude thought her mother oblivious to the individual characters of her children: she treated them fairly, bought presents for their birthdays, thanked God when Bertha’s sore foot got better, Leo recovered from the measles or Gertrude from diarrhoea, but she did not relate to them as individuals:

She was never important to her children excepting to begin them. She was a sweet contented little woman who lived in her husband and children, who could only know well to do middle class living, who never knew what it was her husband and her children were working out inside them and around them.

Gertrude in her own way championed her mother’s bourgeois values and love of daily living, an orderly home, good food and comfort.

Gertrude and Leo’s childhood

Amelia Stein became ill with bowel cancer in 1884 when Gertrude was ten. Daily, she wrote in her diary ‘not quite well’. She chronicled doctors’ appointments, salt baths and radiation treatments. Mothering became too much for her.

Unsupervised, Gertrude and Leo disappeared for days at a time, camping alone in the hills. They ‘dragged a little wagon and slept closely huddled together’. They had a gun, and shot birds and rabbits. Nights were beautiful. ‘In other lands the heavens appear as a surface; here every star shines down out of the blue behind it.’ They spent their pocket money on books and read widely and unselectively – Wordsworth, Scott, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare’s plays, Congressional Records, science and history books. Gertrude read the Bible to find out about eternity: ‘There was nothing there. There was God of course and he spoke, but there was nothing about eternity.’

Her favourite things were books and food:

Evolution was all over my childhood… with music as a background for emotion and books as a reality and a great deal of eating as an excitement and as an orgy… Most of all there were books and food, food and books, both excellent things.

Books and food were abiding passions for Gertrude. Most of the Steins were very large and keen on food. Simon, Gertrude said, would eat a family-sized rice pudding at one sitting. A problematic relationship to food affected many of her relatives. Grandma Stein was a mountain of a woman and one of her sons died from obesity. Leo, when adult, was anxious and fetishistic about his diet, had digestion problems, went on punishing fasts and regimes of raw vegetables and nuts and said he did not know when he was hungry. He blamed their father’s weird control about what could or could not be eaten. Gertrude said of her father and food:

He always liked to think about what was good for him in eating. He liked to think about what was good for everyone around him in their eating eating. He liked to buy all kinds of eating, he liked all kinds of thinking about eating, eating was living to him.

Alice more than attended to Gertrude’s kinds of eating eating, as her recipes, published after Gertrude’s death in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, testified.

Gertrude was the youngest of the five Stein children; Leo was two years older:

It is better if you are the youngest in a family to have a brother two years older, because that makes everything a pleasure to you, you go everywhere and do everything while he does it all for you and with you which is a pleasant way to have everything happen to you.

As a child, Gertrude was emotionally dependent on Leo. With little parental support or guidance, they turned to each other for comfort and safety. Neither felt close to their brothers and sister. They respected Michael but he was older, with the demeanour of the responsible eldest son. Bertha ‘was not a pleasant person’, Gertrude said. She shared a bedroom with her. ‘It is natural not to care about a sister, certainly not when she is four years older and grinds her teeth at night.’ She ‘married a man who well they married’. Leo’s only adult recollection of Bertha was a little girl on a chamber pot. In October 1941, aged nearly seventy, he dreamed he was married to her, which he found intolerable. In his dream she wanted to sleep with him but he insisted on going to another bed. Possibly when young and motherless there was some kind of sexual exchange between Leo and Gertrude. She was the sister he