Gertrude Stein — American Writer
Art Collector and Author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
Twenty odd years ago, in Paris, I retraced Ernest Hemingway’s steps (albeit in the opposite direction) to Gertrude Stein’s apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. It was (and probably still is) a grand building, but unlike Hemingway and his wife Hadley, I didn’t ring the bell. Stein had been dead for fifty years.
It had taken Hemingway quite a while to pluck up courage to visit the infamous writer and art collector, but when he did and the door was opened by Stein’s lover and companion, Alice Toklas, his and Hadley’s lives were changed forever. Stein had a reputation for doing that.
Hemingway describes the apartment:
“ There was a big fireplace and it was warm and comfortable and they gave you good things to eat and tea and natural distilled liqueurs made from purple plums, or wild raspberries.”
In 1922, when Hemingway and Hadley visited, Gertrude Stein was forty-eight years old, and as Hemingway biographer, Carlos Baker, points out, she was old enough to be his mother, and reminded Hemingway of the peasant women from the countryside around Milan “…short, solidly built, with beautiful dark eyes and thick immigrant hair.”
