SAN FRANCISCO - We still don’t know Gertrude Stein, one of America’s greatest writers, very well. That much is suggested by two museum exhibitions in this city, across the Bay from where Stein grew up, in Oakland.

In the eight years between 1903 and 1911, when Stein was in her late 20s and early 30s, she wrote her masterpiece, “The Making of Americans.” In this, the first major modern experimental novel in English, she was trying to create eternity - “the everlasting,” she called it - in prose.

And given the demands the book makes on a reader’s attention, she, in a way, succeeded. “The Making of Americans” has a reputation for being unreadable, which it isn’t, though its difficulties have to be experienced to be believed, and its greatness has to be believed in for reading to continue.

The book is almost a thousand printed pages. It was in plain English, but rich with moral weight and haunted emotion. Forward direction ends; time stops, or rather freezes in an eternal present where nothing new happens because everything is happening all the time. Stein couldn’t find a publisher for the book until 1925, when she was over 50, by which time she had written many other things, become an art collector in Paris and found a life partner.

“The Making of Americans” clinched her high reputation in elite literary circles. But she was hungry for fame . So she shifted out of vanguard mode, turned on the charm and produced “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.”

Written under the name of her longtime lover and as a pioneer of a gay sensibility, “Autobiography” is a book-length advertisement for Stein herself as the primary shaper of early Modernism in Paris.

The book is easy to read. In Alice’s voice Stein name-drops, dishes, fabricates (“God, what a liar she is,” her older brother, Leo, fumed) and self-promotes . The book became a best seller in the United States .

The two remarkable Stein-related exhibitions approach her from two angles: as an art patron in one case, and as a social personality in the other. Both shows seriously question Stein’s own solitary-genius account of herself in these roles.

At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” we meet Stein the art entrepreneur in Paris as expected, except that she is by no means alone. A year before she arrived in 1903, Leo was already there and acquiring Cezanne and Renoirs, and he let her tag along. Soon they began to buy together - the show in part reconstructs their collection.

The show demonstrates that Gertrude Stein was not the singlehanded shaper of new art. Artists she patronized later on her own were pretty bad . But in the early days she did something right: she backed Picasso at the moment when he was moving into Cubism.

For her, Cubism was an exhilaration . It altered perceptions of time and space - effects she was seeking in writing.

The exhibition called “Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories” at the Contemporary Jewish Museum dispels the stand-alone-genius Stein myth by bringing Alice Toklas fully into the picture.

They met in 1907, when Toklas, a San Francisco native, was visiting Europe. The women began a partnership that became , in many ways, a collaboration.

Stein and Toklas have, of course, been gay inspirations . They were, within the era’s conventions, astonishingly forthright about their relationship.

But neither ever made a point of acknowledging they were Jewish. And there was a deeply conservative streak in Stein’s character . What is one to make of Stein’s alleged approval of Francisco Franco? Or her oddly neutral reaction on learning about the Nazi death camps?

So what are we left with in Stein? She appears, in the end, a model of ambiguity.

And ambiguity is the very substance of “The Making of Americans. ” her great lonesome novel. It is the work that Stein’s cultural persona has distracted us from, that is as experimental now as when it was written; that hardly anyone reads; that offers both Stein and her readers a way to live; that I’ve been reading for years, and will continue reading, and will never finish.


HOLLAND COTTER
ESSAY