Books: Stem's Way

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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, spent her youth in California and Baltimore. At Radcliffe she studied under Psychologist William James, was one of his star pupils. At the final examination in his course she turned in a blank paper, with a note explaining that she did not feel like writing an exam that day. Next day came a postcard from James saying: "I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself"; and giving her the highest mark in the class. At Johns Hopkins Medical School she also had a resounding reputation as a student, but medicine bored her ("she dislikes the abnormal, it is so obvious"). When she failed to take her degree she was glad to be rescued from a career that interested her so little.

In Paris the purchase of a Matisse picture started a friendship with Matisse; soon she was in the midst of the pre-War Paris art world. She and Picasso hit it off from the first: with the interlude of one bad quarrel they have remained best friends. Both of them acknowledge that they are geniuses. Gertrude Stein "realizes that in English literature in her time she is the only one. She has always known it and now she says it." Though she does not believe in popular success she would like to have had a little more recognition. For years she could not get even a part of her magnum opus (The Making of Americans) printed; her influence has been largely vicarious, and she has not always approved of the writers (notably Ernest Hemingway) whom she has influenced. But she has never stopped writing. "One of the things that I have liked all these years is to be surrounded by people who know no english. It has left me more intensely alone with my eyes and my english. . . . And they none of them could read a word I wrote, most of them did not even know that I did write."

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