Ernest Hemingway — Gertrude Stein
And the Paris of the early 1920s
Hemingway introduced himself (with the help of a letter from Sherwood Anderson) to Gertrude Stein, who immediately lectured him (while her lover and secretary, Alice B. Toklas, fed Hadley tea and cakes in a separate room) on what it was to be a writer, on what it was to be a painter, to be a musician, to be a dancer, to be, to be…
Hemingway knew, when he looked at Stein’s impressive collection of Cezannes, and Monets, and Picassos, that he wanted to write the way they had painted, and were painting: with a clarity, and a vision, and with all the colours, the smells, and the tastes, and, and, well everything.
Gertrude Stein was born in Pennsylvania in 1874 into a progressive, wealthy, and intellectual family of German-Jewish origin. She studied psychology at Radcliffe College and then the anatomy of the brain at John Hopkins. In 1902 she went with her brother Leo — with whom she later fell out — to Paris where she settled into a first- floor apartment in the Rue de Fleurus, just off the Luxembourg Gardens.
Her home soon became a literary salon and art gallery, and a centre of the emerging avant-garde. Her lover, the strange bird-like Alice B.Toklas, was born in San Francisco in 1877 and was a thin, beak-nosed woman, whereas Stein was short and very stout. Stein became the great…
