Books: Stem's Way

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The Woman. If posterity understands present-day art. it is likely that the future will have a pretty good idea what Gertrude Stein looked like. Picasso has painted her, Picabia has drawn her. Jo Davidson has done a joss-like statue of her. Never a beauty, she is now massive, middleaged, 59, would strongly resemble a fat Jewish hausfrau were it not for her close-cropped head. (When her old friend Mme de Clermont-Tonnerre had her hair bobbed, Gertrude Stein decided to cut her hair short too. Alice Toklas did it for her.) Very democratic, proud of being a plain American, she likes people, is always ac- cessible to strangers. She confesses to inertia and a poor memory. An omnivorous reader, she was haunted in early life by the fear that some day she would have nothing left to read; nowadays she no longer worries about it. Though she lives in France (summers she spends in her house at Bilignin) she never reads French, even so much as a newspaper. She ''feels with her eyes," says she sometimes used to rest them by staring "straight up into a summer noon sun." If somebody asks her a question suddenly it upsets her, drives everything out of her head. She swears when she is upset. She likes food but does not mind letting it get cold.

Though she has lived among artists and pictures all her life there is nothing precious or arty about her. Two subjects which bulk large in ordinary lives—money and love—she hardly mentions in Alice B. Toklas. 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 everybody else, has autobiographical passages which she does not choose to run.

*Harcourt. Brace ($3.50).

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