The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down (6 page)

The Steins bought their first Picasso,
Lajeunefille aux fleurs,
in 1905. Gertrude hated the painting but grudgingly allowed Leo to acquire it. When they sought out the young artist in his
studio, however, she was immediately drawn to him and they struck up a friendship that was to endure for the next forty years.
They spent $150 on that first visit and came away with "scores" of paintings from his blue and rose periods. The following
year, after great struggle, he produced his
Portrait of Gertrude Stein,
an important transitional work on the way to cubism, which emerged full­blown in 1907 with
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.
Although he had been Picasso's initial champion, Leo reviled the new development, whereas Gertrude reveled in it. From that
moment, Picasso and Gertrude owned the modernist movement, and Matisse and Leo found themselves
on
the sidelines. Gertrude usurped Leo's role as oracle, and young men began to gather at her feet to look and listen in veneration.
It was at this juncture that she began to assume the appurtenances of "a Sumerian monument."

It was also in 1907 (just as Ottoline Morrell was inaugurating her Thursday evenings on Bedford Square) that Gertrude first
met Alice Babette Toklas, who was to become her lifelong companion and factotum, further accelerating Gertrude's alienation
from her brother. Although they had been each other's vital companions in earlier years, after Leo eventually moved to Italy
in 1913 they never spoke again.

At this point, Gertrude Stein had had little success with her own writing, nor would she for many years afterward. It is true
that many an intelligent critic has dismissed her talents as obscure or illusory. Her own brother (admittedly embittered)
once told a friend that "you have no idea how dumb she is" and that "Gertrude can't think consecutively for ten seconds,"
but that is beside the point. Much of her work may be impenetrable and numbingly repetitive, but there is no doubt that no
one was writing like her at the time, and since she was at least partially responsible for discovering the work of the century's
best artists when they had few other boosters, she may perhaps be forgiven for assuming her intuition to be infallible when
it came to her own genius. Boastful she certainly was - intolerably so to those in whom she had no interest - but her arrogance
was of far greater benefit to her artists than it ever proved to herself.

She eventually managed to publish
Three Lives
in 1909 at her own expense (six hundred dollars), selling fewer than a hundred copies in the first eighteen months but garnering
some favorable reviews. It also brought her work to the attention of a generation of American writers that would rise to prominence
with her name balanced reverentially on the tips of their tongues, like a communion wafer. Roger Fry's writing about Stein
in the
Burlington
Review
prompted visits by Augustus John, Henry Lamb, and their patron. "There was Lady Ottoline Morrell looking like a marvelous
feminine version of Disraeli and tall and strange shyly hesitating at the door," Stein would later write. Stein's reciprocating
visit to Garsington a few years later was not a success, as she was unable to abide the "continuous pleasant hesitating flow
of conversation, the never ceasing sound of the human voice speaking in english."

The truth is, Stein would essentially remain a figure of ridicule and bemusement to the general public until the astounding
commercial success of
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
in 1933. She was the high priestess of a dangerous and arcane cult, revered by her followers, feared and maligned by the rest.
Although often bitter about her lack of publishing success, especially as so many younger writers in her stable rose to fame,
she was self-confident enough to amortize her image as a "pagan idol" and to scorn popular opinion. The 1913 Armory Show in
New York, to which she loaned many of the most important works, only heightened that reputation, but it was the 1914 publication
of
Tender Buttons
that sealed it, spawning a raft of malicious parodies of her style.
Tender Buttons,
she claimed, "had an enormous influence on all young writers and started off columnists in the newspapers of the whole country
on their long campaign of ridicule." She would read the best of these out loud to Alice and chuckle.

The outbreak of war caught her in England, visiting with Alfred North Whitehead. She and Alice spent much of the following
two years in Spain, but eventually she was overcome by a strong need to involve herself in the war effort and returned to
France in 1916. She had a Ford truck shipped from the United States and fitted out as an ambulance, which she drove for the
American Fund for French Wounded. Throughout the rest of the war, working in Perpignan and Nimes, she delivered medical supplies
and adopted numerous military "god-sons," to whom she wrote long letters after their return to the front. For her efforts,
she was ultimately awarded the Medaille de la Reconnaissance Franaise.

After the war and some civilian relief work in Alsace, she and Alice returned to the rue de Fleurus but did not resume their
Saturday evenings. Too much had changed. It was "very difficult to think back and remember what happened before." Apollinaire
was dead; she and Picasso were (temporarily) on the outs; Matisse was in Nice; Juan Gris was sick. "We saw a tremendous number
of people but none of them as far as I can remember that we had ever known before."

Still, Stein remained the patron saint of the avant-garde and continued to take her role seriously, befriending the young
American writers and artists who flocked to Paris in the Jazz Age. By 1926, Janet Flanner was able to write in
The New Yorker:
"No American writer is taken more seriously than Miss Stein by the Paris modernists." Those who sought her out, called her
friend, and enjoyed her hospitality included Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles,
and Glenway Wescott, but they did not come for her help and patronage - they came for her benediction.

It is not difficult to come up with any number of reasons why Ottoline Morrell ultimately failed and Gertrude Stein succeeded
as patrons and hostesses. Stein had an abundance of self-confidence and hubris where Ottoline had none. Stein's primary identity
was as a creator and artist in her own right and she was able to look even the most arrogant of her benefactees in the eye.
Ottoline had little "natural sufficiency" and her artists could not help but recognize and disdain the vicarious nature of
her attachment to them. Both had plenty of vocal detractors, but in Stein the waves of ridicule ran up against an impervious
dike, while they simply overwhelmed and swept away Morrell's castle of sand. Many of Ottoline's guests, including Virginia
Woolf and D. H. Lawrence, mistrusted and resented what they saw as her aristocratic maternalism, whereas Stein's salon was
always and emphatically democratic and inclusive. Then, too, it was a question of their respective guest lists: Stein's Frenchmen,
Spaniards, and Americans were thirsty and excitable, whereas Ottoline's Englishmen were jaded by class distinctions and bitter,
especially during and after the war.

All of these are reasonable and acceptable explanations, but they do not necessarily provide us with insight into the true
nature of our hospitality and the secret currency of human transactions. After all, each of us knows people endowed with extraordinary
arrogance or insuperable insecurities - often both together. Many may be extremely and generously hospitable, but few are
so rash as to open their home and wallet (let alone the fortress of their ego) to hungry, self-centered, and ungrateful artists.
And with good reason: you may be able to persuade a group of stock analysts to line up obediently before a bowl of iced Beluga
and a bottle of '71 Chateau Petrus, but artists are harder to wrangle. They do not necessarily respond to the standard stimuli
of hospitality. Any host determined to transform her guests into teddy bears had better stalk tamer game unless she is very
sure of herself, because this exercise is certain to strip away the comforting illusions about hospitality, revealing the
ugly bedrock truth that we would all prefer to remain buried: no one, wealthy arts patrons least of all, gives something for
nothing. Even when she is not sure of what she is after, even when she is unconscious of having an agenda, a host expects
a return on her largesse. It may be and is likely to be an intangible return, banked only in hidden vaults, but it must be
made if the contract between host and guest is to prove profitable to both.

The guest senses this even more acutely than the host - who may be blinded by a dazzling perception of her own disinterest
and is constantly seeking clues and signals as to the nature of the host's desires. It is only when the host is somehow able
to communicate those desires - when she has exercised her will upon her teddy bears - that the experience of her hospitality
will be positive and fruitful for both. When her signals are murky and half-hearted, when she speaks her strength but acts
her weakness, when she seeks more than she can or is willing to give, the guest has every right to feel cheated and to turn
against his would-be partner.

Gertrude Stein understood this. She offered leadership for solidarity, and it was a fair deal for everyone. Ottoline Morrell
did not. She offered tea and cakes in return for a natural sufficiency that no one could give her. It was a preposterous proposal,
and they all laughed at her. If you pretend to feed a teddy bear, he will pretend to eat, and you will both be happy. If you
try to force-feed him, you will both end up covered in slop.

CHAPTER III

ODD FISH

The host in the role of confidence man never inspires faith.

Richard Ellsworth Call,
The Life and Writings of Rafinesque

In the spring of 1818, a weary traveler disembarked from a small boat on the Ohio River at the village of Henderson, Kentucky.
Carrying what appeared to be a sheaf of dried clover on his back, wearing a badly stained and worn suit of yellow nankeen
and pantaloons buttoned down to the ankles, and sporting a long beard and lank black hair below his shoulders, the traveler
gave every appearance of being a wandering quack or herbalist of no social standing. Approaching the first person he met on
the riverbank, he asked in a heavy French accent for directions to the grocer's house. The man happened to be that very grocer
and told him so. The traveler then presented the grocer with a letter of introduction from a mutual acquaintance in Lexington.

"I send you an odd fish," the brief letter read, "which you may prove to be undescribed." The grocer asked the traveler if
he might see the fish. The traveler smiled with good humor.

"I am that odd fish I presume," he said.

In Greek, the word for hospitality is
xenia,
derived from
xenos,
meaning "stranger" or "foreigner." Although
xenia
was a central element of Greek culture, the word survives in common English only as the root of
xenophobia,
with very negative connotations. Our word
hospitality,
on the other hand, comes from the Latin
hospes,
meaning "host," as well as "guest," and which itself is a condensed form of
hostipotis,
meaning "lord of strangers." In other words, the Greek concept of hospitality was based on the primacy of the guest, whereas
the Latin concept, which we inherited, was based on that of the host. In ancient Greece, the host always sat in the smaller
chair, lower than that of the guest; with us, the host sits at the head of the table. In Greece, even the wealthiest host
served simple dishes designed solely to satisfy a guest's hunger; with the Romans, as with us, elaborate culinary constructs
serve mostly to highlight the host's tastes and skills. Some may argue that our espousal of the Latin model has nothing to
do with cultural identity, but that is clearly not so. We choose our words to fit our ideas, and the Latin fit better than
the Greek. In the West, it is the role of the host that matters, for he is lord of strangers.

I must admit, to my chagrin, that almost everyone who gets to enjoy my hospitality is a friend, or at least someone I know.
I wish I could say that, like the Greeks, we make friends and connections by offering food and shelter to strangers, but that
doesn't seem to be the way in New York City. We make friends by going to someone else's house and meeting their friends, which
is not terrible per se, but may be limiting. You tend to meet more people like yourself that way, people who probably don't
need more friends and who are almost certainly not strangers stranded in a foreign city, for whom hospitality is more than
just a pleasant way to while away an evening.

As an example of just how limiting this approach can be, my wife and I recently learned of a dinner party given by friends
of ours, to which we had not been invited. That was fine, of course, but we were dismayed to discover that they had invited
friends of ours whom they had met at a dinner we had given several weeks earlier. Everyone we spoke to agreed that it was
at the very least bad manners to exclude us, the introducers, from their first unmediated encounter. There was a sense of
poaching in the reproach, almost as if something had been stolen from us. At the time, I shared the general feeling that a
wrong had been committed, but I've changed my mind. A host, I've come to see, should aspire to be the lord of strangers, not
the lord of friends of friends.

Many anthropologists believe that hospitality arose as an adjunct to long-distance trade. Long before
xenia
even, Mesopotamian traveling merchants were compelled to rely on strangers for shelter in a world without hotels. Brillat-Savarin
claimed that hospitality began as protection for travelers who brought news from other lands, a sort of primordial diplomatic
immunity. However it may have begun, reliance on strangers for hospitality was ubiquitous in ancient and medieval Europe.

It was also a prominent feature of life on the American frontier - such as Henderson, Kentucky, in 1818 - where white settlements
were few and far between, inns and other amenities scarce, and currency either unavailable or unreliable as a means of exchange.
You had little choice: if you were planning to travel west, beyond the States, you had better line up your letters of introduction
well in advance, because you were going to be sleeping in the homes of strangers. You would need to feel comfortable that
you could trust them, as they would you.

The traveler in yellow and the grocer had much in common, though they didn't know it. Both were native French speakers, the
sons of successful merchants, who had fled to the United States in their youth to escape being drafted into Napoleon's armies.
Both had arrived in calamitous circumstances - the traveler in a near fatal shipwreck, the grocer with a near fatal case of
yellow fever. Neither had a formal higher education. Both had spent arduous years of wilderness trekking throughout the vast
country. Both were ambitious and driven men, yet neither was able to make any sort of a living at his chosen calling. Both
were considered to be exceedingly unconventional by those who knew them, and both were naturalists. The grocer was John James
Audubon, who twenty years later was to be the most celebrated artist and ornithologist in the New World. The traveler was
Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz, a prolific autodidact with a modest but growing reputation as a discoverer of new
species, who twenty-two years later would die alone, penniless, and unmourned in a garret on Race Street in Philadelphia.
Their encounter in Henderson was, in some measure, to contribute to the fates of both.

Whatever Audubon and Rafinesque had in common was essentially superficial, but their differences were critical. Whereas Audubon
was consistently characterized as "simple" (in the sense of unaffected), Rafinesque could never shake "eccentric." Audubon
was charming, handsome, and well-groomed, a born storyteller and talented musician at a time when and in a place where home
entertainment was pretty much the only entertainment. Although the next few years were to prove extremely difficult for him
following a painful bankruptcy, he was always able to get what he needed out of people, especially women. He had a devoted
and doting family willing to put up with years of absence and penury for the sake of his professional advancement.

Rafinesque, on the other hand, was perennially unkempt, physically unimposing, socially awkward, absentminded, and the object
of some ridicule and contempt among his peers. In the 1890s, Richard Ellsworth Call interviewed several people who had known
him in their youth: "Careless of his style of dressing, indeed, his clothes never fitted him and appeared to have been made
for some one e l s e . . . an eccentric man"; "a man of peculiar habits and . . . very eccentric"; "He was a stranger . .
. all the young people made jokes at his expense . . . he knew none of the arts that make a man popular"; "A small, peculiar
looking Italian . . . very scientific, absorbed in his books and his bugs, his researches and his writings . . . an innocent,
inoffensive sort of man."

Naturalism in the United States was then in its infancy and anyone who wanted to make a name for himself in the field had
to be ready to head into the wilderness to seek new species. He also had to be able to record what he had seen, in drawing
and in accurate, scientifically grounded notes. Audubon was a keen outdoorsman, a superb shot, and a robust camper, able to
endure enormous hardship for the sake of capturing one new finch on paper. He was, of course, a brilliant artist and a tireless
observer. Rafinesque - although gifted with occasionally brilliant insight and credited by some with having discovered "the
basic law of change in species some twenty years or more before Charles Darwin" - was a terrible draftsman and an unreliable
note-taker who went into the field in the summer but waited until winter to draft his observations. He was an impatient researcher
and a foolishly rash publisher who "once sent for publication a paper describing, in regular natural history style, twelve
new species of thunder and lightning which he had observed near the Falls of the Ohio." As David Starr Jordan, first president
of Stanford University, noted, "Rafinesque's work as a whole is bad enough, and bad in a peculiarly original and exasperating
way." Another refers to "the beauty of the quaint French penmanship and the atrocious badness of the accompanying drawings."
Although he crossed the Alleghenies five times on foot, once registering twelve hundred miles in a single year, he was out
of place in nature, where he was tormented by weather, hunger, and biting insects and where, by his own admission, he carried
an umbrella.

Of all the differences between the two men, perhaps the most telling was Audubon's ferocious single-mindedness. From his earliest
days, he had had one ambition and one ambition only: to draw and be recognized as the world's foremost artist of nature. From
early adulthood, his entire life and substance were devoted to that purpose. He left his beloved sons and wife for years on
end to raise money and support for his project and, when in the field, often spent eighteen hours a day shooting, drawing,
and taking notes. Rafinesque was, to put it mildly, eclectic. Although he always considered himself to be a naturalist, he
also boasted without irony of having been a botanist, geologist, geographer, historian, poet, philosopher, philologist, economist,
philanthropist, traveler, merchant, manufacturer, brewer, collector, improver, teacher, surveyor, draughtsman, architect,
engineer, palmist, author, editor, bookseller, librarian, and secretary. "I hardly know what I may not become as yet, since,
whenever I apply myself to anything which I like, I never fail to succeed," he wrote with considerable exaggeration.

Up to the moment of their encounter, Rafinesque had endured the same sort of ill fortune that would continue to pursue him
throughout his remaining days. Born in Galata, near Constantinople, in 1783, he was raised in Marseilles and Genoa. He lost
his father to yellow fever when he was ten and his father's fortune to a dishonest partner. His mother, a timorous German,
kept him locked away from the rest of the world, educated him with private tutors, and generally left him "largely unprepared
to defend himself in an aggressive, selfish world." It did not help that his sole passion was botany, a solitary vocation.
With Napoleon's recruiters closing in, she shipped him off to Philadelphia in 1802, where he toiled as a shipping clerk while
scouring the countryside for specimens.

He returned to Italy in 1804, moving to Sicily where he lived for the next ten years. He worked as secretary to the United
States consul and as the manager of a whiskey distillery before making a small fortune exporting medicinal squill, a wild
herb which he allowed the Sicilians to believe was being used in the manufacture of dye. He married and had two children,
a daughter and a son who died in infancy. When the Sicilians came to understand how profitable his business was and cut off
their dealings with him, and when his wife took up with a squalid comedian named Giovanni Pizzarrone, he decided to cash in
his chips and head back to the States. For Rafinesque, Sicily had become a land of "fruitful soil, delightful climate, excellent
productions, perfidious men, deceitful women."

On November 2, 1815, his ship lost its keel off Race Rocks, at the eastern end of Long Island. "I had lost every thing, my
fortune, my share of the cargo, my collections and labors for 20 years past, my books, my manuscripts, my drawings, even my
clothes . . . I walked to New London." He eventually found his way to New York, where he worked for a time as private tutor
to the Livingston family in Clermont. But it was the opening West, with its uncounted new species of plants and fish, that
held his fascination. Traveling almost exclusively by foot through New York state, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania,
he gradually made his way to Kentucky, where an old family friend recommended him for a job as professor of natural history
and modern languages at Transylvania University, in Lexington. It was to this, the sole of the many academic posts to which
he applied that he was ever appointed to, that he was headed when he stopped off in Henderson. If anyone in the world needed
a helping hand and a sympathetic ear in the wilderness, it was Rafinesque.

He was warmly welcomed into the modest but respectable Audubon log cabin, which was only too well accustomed to accommodating
travelers and itinerant family members. He amused the occupants by refusing to change his filthy clothes and by his very apparent
reluctance to wash before dinner. Upon examining Audubon's drawings, he categorically refused to believe that one plant depicted
therein really existed until Audubon led him to the riverbank to observe the original. When convinced, he danced with joy,
hugged Audubon, and there and then declared the discovery of a new genus. Still, despite the visitor's eccentricities, Audubon
claims to have found him charming and erudite. "I listened to him with as much delight as Telemachus could have listened to
Mentor."

Late on the night of Rafinesque's arrival, when all but Audubon were asleep, the household was disturbed by an almighty racket
coming from the naturalist's room. Audubon rushed to the scene of the commotion:

I saw my guest running about the room naked, holding the handle of my favorite violin, the body of which he had battered to
pieces against the walls in attempting to kill the bats which had entered by the open window, probably attracted by the insects
flying around his candle. I stood amazed, but he continued jumping and running round and round, until he was fairly exhausted,
when he begged me to procure one of the animals for him, as he felt convinced they belonged to "a new species." Although I
was convinced of the contrary, I took up the bow of my demolished Cremona, and administering a smart tap to each of the bats
as it came up, soon got specimens enough. The war ended, I again bade him good night, but could not help observing the state
of the room. It was strewed with plants, which it would seem he had arranged into groups, but which were now scattered about
in confusion. "Never mind, Mr AUDUBON," quoth the eccentric naturalist, "never mind, I'll soon arrange them again. I have
the bats, and that's enough."