All I Know About Gertrude Stein

Women used to be in charge of love – it was our whole domain, the business of our lives, to give love to make love to mend love to tend love.

Men needed women to be love so that men could do all the things you can’t do without love – but no one acknowledged the secret necessity of love. Except in those dedications: To My Wife.

Now we have our own money and we can vote. We are career-women. (No such word as career-man.) We are more than the love interest. More than love. We are independent. Equal.

But . . . What happened to love?

We were confident that love would always be there, like air, like water, like summer, like sun. Love could take care of itself. We didn’t notice the quiet tending of love, the small daily repairs to the fabric of love. The faithful gigantic work that kept love as regular as light.

Love is an ecosystem like any other. You can’t drain it and strip- mine it, drill it and build over it and wonder where the birds and the bees have gone.

Love is where we want to live. Planet Love.

When we met, the most surprising and touching thing to me was that you always answered your phone when I called. You were not too important to be available. You are important but you recognized love as more important.

I started to believe you. I started to believe in you. Love has a religious quality to it – it depends on the unseen and it makes miracles out of itself. And there is always a sacrifice. I don’t think we talk about love in real terms any more. We talk about partnership. We talk about romance. We talk about sex. We talk about divorce. I don’t think we talk about love at all.

Alice Toklas never went back to San Francisco. She never saw her family again. Gertrude’s brother Leo soon moved out of the rue de Fleurus and Alice moved in. They were together every day for the next forty years. Shall I write that again? They were together every day for the next forty years . . . And they never stopped having sex.

Gertrude Stein liked giving Alice an orgasm – she called it ‘making a cow come out’. Nobody knows why – unless Alice made moo noises when she hit it. Gertrude said, ‘I am the best cow-giver in the world.’ Gertrude Stein liked repetition too – of verbs and words and orgasms.

We love the habits of love. The way you wear your hair. The way you drink your coffee. The way you turn your back on me in the mornings so that I will shift to fit myself round you. The way you open the door when you see me coming home. When I leave I look up at the window and I know you will be watching me, watching over me go.

And at the same time love needs to be new every day. The fresh damp risen-up feel of love.

Gertrude Stein said – There is no there there – at once refusing materiality and consolation.

I am lonely when I love because I feel the immensity of the task – the stoking and tending of love. I feel unable, overwhelmed. I feel I can only fail. So I hide and I cling all at once. I need you near me, in my house, but I don’t want you to find my hiding place. Hold me. Don’t come too close.

I decided to walk to the Musée Picasso because the Picasso portrait of Gertrude Stein was on loan there from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It is a famous picture. Gertrude is massy in the frame, her head almost a kabuki mask. It doesn’t look like her but it couldn’t be anyone else. Picasso took ninety sittings to paint it and couldn’t get the head right. Gertrude said, ‘Paint it out and paint it in when I am not there.’

Picasso did that and Gertrude was very pleased. She hung the picture over her fireplace, and during the Second World War she and Alice took it to the countryside for five years, wrapped in a sheet, in their old open-topped Ford.

Gertrude said to Picasso, ‘Paint what is really there. Not what you can see, but what is really there.’