All I Know About Gertrude Stein

I sat opposite you and I liked your dishevelled look; hair in your eyes and your clothes a strategic mess. We were both survivors of other shipwrecks. You looked sad. I wanted to see you again.

For a while we corresponded by email, charming each other in fonts and pixels. Did you . . . do you . . . would you like to . . . I wonder if . . .

Every day Miss Toklas sent a petit bleu to Miss Stein to arrange a walk in the Luxembourg Gardens or a visit to a bookshop or to look at pictures.

One day Alice was late. Gertrude was so angry. Alice picked up her gloves to leave but as she was walking across the courtyard Gertrude called out, ‘It is not too late to go for a walk.’

We went walking on Hampstead Heath. We walked for two hours straight ahead going round in circles. The circles were the two compass-turns of your desire and mine. The overlap is where we kissed.

The Stein and Toklas love affair was about sex.

They went on holiday together – the dripping heat of Italy and Gertrude liking to walk in the noonday sun.

They talked about The Taming of the Shrew – that play by Shakespeare – the one where Petruchio breaks Kate into loving him – a strange play. Not a poster-play for feminism.

GERTRUDE: A wife hangs upon her husband – that is what Shakespeare says.

ALICE: But you have never married.

GERTRUDE: I would like a wife.

ALICE: What kind of a wife would she be?

GERTRUDE: Ardent, able, clever, present. Yes, very present.

ALICE: I am going back to San Francisco in ten days.

GERTRUDE: I have enjoyed your visits every day to the rue de Fleurus . . .

And they walked in silence up the hill into the crest of the sun and Alice began to shed her clothes – her stockings, her cherry-red corset. Alice began to undress the past. At the top of the hill they sat down and Gertrude did not look at her.

GERTRUDE: When all is said one is wedded to bed.

It was the beginning of their love affair.

I met my lover two years ago and I fell in love. I fell like a stray star caught in the orbit of Venus. Love had me. Love held me. Love like wrist-cords. Love like a voice from a long way off. I love your voice on the phone.

Below me on the quai there’s a skinny boy singing to his guitar: All You Need is Love. Couples holding hands throw him coins because they want to believe that it is true. They want to believe that they are true.

But the love question is harder to solve than the Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

If you were Dante you’d say they were the same thing – ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’.

But love is in trouble.