What Gertrude Stein Still Has to Teach Us, via Deborah Levy
There is something in the nature of Paris that invites a certain kind of retrospection — the city as archive, as mirror, as the place where English-speaking writers have always come to become something other than themselves. Hemingway did it; Baldwin did it; and Gertrude Stein, who lived there for nearly four decades, became so much the city's furniture that the city itself seems to have absorbed her.
Deborah Levy's new book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is at once a memoir, a piece of criticism, and something that resists both labels with characteristic Levy stubbornness. It is the account of a year Levy spent in Paris — the title borrowed, deliberately, from Stein's own The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is itself not quite an autobiography — retracing the life of a woman who was both central to literary modernism and, for decades, systematically underread.
Stein is a complicated inheritance. She wrote in a way that made many readers feel dense, as though the fault lay with them rather than with prose doing something genuinely new. She hosted Picasso, she influenced Hemingway, and Hemingway, in his typically gracious fashion, later spent considerable energy diminishing her. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own — published in 1929, the same year Stein's career reached a peculiar plateau — asked whether women's writing would ever receive the institutional support it required. The question was not rhetorical.
Levy, whose own living autobiography trilogy tracked the conditions necessary for a woman writer to exist without apology, brings to Stein a particular kind of attention: not reverence, but recognition. She reads Tender Buttons with the careful curiosity of someone who has spent her own career being slightly misclassified. The result is a book that teaches you to read Stein not by explaining her but by thinking alongside her. The modernist world Stein inhabited — a Paris of sustained intellectual labor, of two women building a life the literary establishment preferred to overlook — finds its echo in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, a novel of concealed betrayal from 1915 that maps the same Edwardian world from the angle men controlled.
What Levy understands — and what makes this more than an essay collection — is that Stein's Paris was not the same Paris as Hemingway's or Fitzgerald's. It was a Paris of work, of two women making something durable while the men around them wrote about making something durable.
The book arrives at a moment when the question of which writers have been correctly valued and which have been structurally overlooked is less academic than it used to be. Levy does not make this argument loudly. She makes it by paying close attention.
What remains, when you close the book, is a question Stein herself might have approved: not whether she was underestimated, but how differently we might have read everything else, had she been properly there.
