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

Her younger brother, Simon, had, she said, ‘a very good nose and foolish but not silly eyes and he loved eating and fishing’. She tried, when she was eleven, to teach him that Columbus discovered America in 1492. She asked him each morning and evening, but he could never remember. He achieved little at school and when he left had difficulty in getting or keeping a job.

death of mother and father

In 1888, when Gertrude was fourteen, her mother, Amelia, died. ‘We had already had the habit of doing without her,’ Gertrude wrote, but after her death any semblance of family life disintegrated. Michael was a student at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Bertha could not manage the housekeeping, the dining table was no longer laid and they all ate what and when they pleased. Gertrude and Leo sometimes talked and walked all night and slept all day.

And Father ‘was more a bother than he had been’. He shut himself away for days at a time, was irritable and anxious, took out his frustrations on his children and his business affairs became erratic. He speculated with money and lost it. Leo and Gertrude bought books in the hope of them being an investment when financial ruin came: Shelley in green Moroccan leather binding, an illustrated set of Thackeray’s novels.

This chaotic home life caused Gertrude what she called an ‘agony of adolescence’. She had panic attacks and thought she was breaking down. She described her early childhood as a civilized time of evolution and order and her adolescence as medieval:

Medieval means that life and place and the crops you plant and your wife and children are all uncertain. They can be driven away or taken away, or burned away, or left behind…

Fifteen is really medieval and pioneer and nothing is clear and nothing is safe and nothing is come and nothing is gone. But all might be.

She dropped out of Oakland High School and did not know where to go or what to do. Leo did a year as a ‘student at large’ at the University of California at Berkeley, and father

naturally was not satisfied with anything. That was natural enough… Then one morning we could not wake up our father. Leo climbed in by the window and called out to us that he was dead in his bed and he was… Then our life without a father began. A very pleasant one.

Natalie Barney had a similar response when her father died: she observed his corpse but felt no grief. Daniel Stein died in 1891, three years after his wife. He was fifty-seven. Michael, who was twenty-six, said he died from overeating. He took over as head of the family. Gertrude was seventeen, Leo nineteen. Michael became their legal guardian. ‘I remember’, Gertrude wrote, ‘going to court for the only time I was ever in one to say that we would have him.’

Michael took his responsibilities towards his brothers and sisters to heart. As Alice B. Toklas put it:

He saw not any one of them would ever earn any money. None of them were made for a business career. And he didn’t think of any profession in which they would succeed.

Daniel Stein’s financial affairs were in a mess. ‘There were so many debts it was frightening’, Gertrude wrote, ‘and then I found out that profit and loss is always loss… and it was discouraging…’

Despite debts, her father’s will revealed his ownership of 480 acres of land, property in Baltimore and California, shares in cable, railroad and mining companies and, most lucrative of all, the franchise for an undeveloped project to consolidate the various street railroad systems in San Francisco. Michael Stein sold this franchise to the railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington and became supervisor of the newly formed Market Street Railway Company. His acumen in dealing with their father’s affairs secured for Gertrude and her siblings an income for life. Gertrude described their inherited income as enough to keep them ‘reasonably poor’. Others might think it was enough to keep them reasonably rich. It allowed them to travel, buy books and paintings and be free from the need to work for a living.

student days

For a year after their father’s death, the four children lived together in San Francisco with Michael as head of the household. ‘Then we all went somewhere,’ Gertrude wrote. She and Bertha spent time in Baltimore with their maternal aunt, Fannie Bachrach. Leo went to Harvard to study law, Michael stayed on in San Francisco for a few years with the Railway Company and married a strong-willed, assertive woman, Sarah Samuels, quite unlike his meek mother, Amelia. Simon was the only one to spend the rest of his life in California. Michael found him a job as a part-time gripman – a cable car operator. He died in the city in middle age, ‘still fat and fishing’.

Gertrude chose to study medicine at the Johns Hopkins Medical School with a view to becoming a psychologist. She planned to specialize in nervous diseases in women and needed a degree in medicine for this. Her tutor, William James, ‘the father of American psychology’,1 had published The Principles of Psychology in 1890 and was the first academic to offer a psychology course in the United States. Theodore Roosevelt and George Santayana were among his pupils. Gertrude was impressed by him and he with her, and they became friends.

Gertrude was taken with William James’s idea that automatic writing was a pathway to reveal aspects of personality beyond consciousness. ‘Automatic’, not edited or honed, became the methodology of her prose style: the suspension of critical intervention, words allowed to spin out like a spider’s web from what was hidden within her. She thought her automatic writing had an integrity beyond that of reasoned linear narrative.

For the first two years of studying medicine, Gertrude’s grades were good: 1 for anatomy, 1.5 for normal histology, pathology and bacteriology, 2 for physiology, pharmacology and toxicology. She was a star pupil, though a fellow student, Arthur