The US Tour That Made Gertrude Stein a Household Name

Once on board the ship, Gertrude Stein and Alice were treated like the transatlantic celebrities they had become. Champlain’s captain, William Vogel, invited them to dine at his table during the voyage, but Gertrude declined, preferring to select their own menus each morning and eat at their own private table each night. Inside their stateroom they found a large going-away bouquet from their old friend the Duchess of Clermont-Tonnere, whose flapper-style bob had inspired Gertrude’s own severe haircut a few years earlier. The room was redolent of roses. 

The uneventful crossing took a week. The 641-foot Champlain, built by the French line Chantiers et Ateliers de Saint-Nazaire, was one of three new luxury liners plying the Atlantic that autumn; the others were the Colombie and the Lafayette. Gertrude and Alice mingled freely with other passengers, including the widow of a French general killed at Touraine when they were there, and about whose accidental death Gertrude and Alice maintained a discreet silence.

They also met a woman who read their horoscopes and told Gertrude, unsurprisingly, that her visit to America “would be of the greatest interest to her.” “Everybody talked to us and we talked to everybody,” Gertrude said. They met a prosperous-looking couple from Newark, New Jersey, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Wood, which would quickly prove useful after their arrival in America. And they renewed their acquaintance with Abbé Ernest Dimnet, the best-selling author of The Art of Thinking, a sort of self-help book for intellectuals that included one quote, in particular, that might have pertained to Gertrude: “Genius is not genius all the time, although it is superior all the time.”

The abbé made something of a spectacle of himself during the ship’s mandatory lifeboat drills, complaining loudly that no one was actually getting into the boats. “Tell the captain,” Gertrude said. He went off to do just that, but he returned to report furiously that the captain had told him, “You could not get into the boat unless the ship was stopped it would be too dangerous and to stop the ship was too costly. Yes that is the way it is they prepare they prepare and they never know whether they can do what they are prepared for.”

Dimnet had a point, as the doomed passengers aboard Titanic might have concurred, having never taken part in lifeboat drills themselves before the great liner struck an enormous iceberg in the early morning hours of April 15th, 1912, sending more than 1200 passengers tumbling into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic.

Champlain steamed into New York harbor unscathed on the morning of October 24th. Seeing the Statue of Liberty moved Gertrude, but the famous New York skyline was less dramatic than she expected. “It did not look very high,” she said, “and I was disappointed.” A Coast Guard cutter hove up alongside, loaded to the gunwales with reporters and photographers eager to commemorate the arrival of Gertrude Stein.

Gertrude met them in the ship’s lounge while Alice attended to their luggage in customs. Carl Van Vechten, wearing an easily recognizable bright-green and purple shirt for the occasion, came aboard and assisted Alice with the bags. He was horrified when she went to tip the customs officials in the manner customary for French bureaucrats. “You will not be doing that here,” he said firmly. “Don’t even shake their hands.”

Back in the lounge Gertrude faced the American press for the first time. It was an equal match. William Rogers had whispered to Alice that he was worried about the number of questions they would ask Gertrude. “Oh you do not need to be,” said Alice, “it will not disturb her.” As usual, Alice was right; the press conference went surprisingly well. The hard-bitten New York reporters were charmed by Gertrude—New Yorkers always like someone who can take abuse and give it back.

In short order, Rogers observed, “Miss Stein had the reporters frightened.” Not that she was trying to scare anyone. “Everybody who has ever done anything has seen reporters,” she remembered. “Well anyway there we all were and it was very lively and I liked it. I always like talking and I like asking questions and I like to know who everybody is and where they come from. This first lot asked me questions later on I was able to ask them.”

The reporters had done their homework and came prepared to interrogate Gertrude on the notorious difficulty of her style. “Why don’t you write as you talk?” one wanted to know. “Why don’t you read as I write?” she fired back. She went on to explain: “I do talk as I write, but you can hear better than you can see. You are accustomed to see with your eyes differently to the way you hear with your ears, and perhaps that is what makes it hard to read my works.”

What about all her repetitions? “No, no, no, no, it is not all repetition,” she maintained. “I always change the words a little.” One reporter asked if she had been upset by the comparisons of her writing style to the babbling of insane people. “No, not one bit,” she replied, “because there is an important difference. You can continue to read me, but not the babblings of the insane. Besides, the insane are frequently normal in everything except their own phase of insanity.”

That last point was debatable, as she well knew from her time in medical school, but the reporters let it slide. The talk turned to politics—always a dangerous subject for Gertrude. Someone asked her about a recent speech by President Roosevelt. Only Lincoln Steffens wrote correctly about Roosevelt, she said, mixing her Roosevelt cousins.

Theodore Roosevelt had been dead for several years, it was pointed out to her. “He may not be as dead as you think,” she replied. What about President Coolidge—did she know he was dead too? “Of course he may have died while I was on the boat coming over,” Gertrude said gamely, channeling Dorothy Parker’s famous response to the news that the notoriously tight-lipped Coolidge had died: “How can you tell?”

Fortunately for Gertrude, the reporters were more interested in her appearance than her politics. They cited her thick wool stockings, round-toed, flat-heeled Mary Jane shoes, cream-and- black-striped shirt, coarse tweed suit, and green cloth hat modeled after a Louis XIII–era hunting cap that Alice had seen at the Cluny Museum. The New York Times irritated Gertrude by describing her cap as “a gay hat which gave her the appearance of having just sprung from Robin Hood’s forest.” Others described it variously as “a braumeister’s cap, a jockey’s cap, a deerstalker’s cap and a grouse-hunter’s cap.”

“It’s just a hat,” Gertrude said with a trace of annoyance. They went back to their desks and wrote up her arrival for the morning papers, calling her “the Sibyl of Montparnasse” and “the Mama of Dada” and “the high priestess of the Left Bank.” Headline writers vied for wit: “Gerty Gerty Stein Stein / Is Back Home Home Back,” “Gertrude Stein Barges In / With a Stein Song to Stein,” “Gertrude Stein, Stein / Is Back, Back, and It’s / Still All Black, Black.”

Alice, when mentioned at all, was called “a queer, birdlike shadow,” “an enigmatic bodyguard,” “Miss Stein’s constant companion,” “a somewhat submerged heroine,” and “Gertrude’s Girl Friday.” None of the descriptions were wrong. Evelyn Seeley of the New York World-Telegram reported that someone had asked Gertrude point-blank, “Is there an Alice Toklas?” to which Gertrude had responded happily, “Well, of course! There she is!”

Capitalizing on the attention (or nonattention) paid to Alice, Harcourt, Brace took out a full-page ad in Publishers Weekly declaring tongue in cheek that “Alice B. Toklas really exists. She has been Gertrude Stein’s intimate companion for 25 years.” Stepping clumsily on the book’s surprise ending, the ad went on to reveal, “You find out on the last page that Gertrude Stein wrote it.” So much for the twist.

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The following is an excerpt from Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend by Roy Morris Jr, published with permission from Johns Hopkins University Press.