Steinways

By Martha Duffy

CHARMED CIRCLE

by JAMES R. MELLOW 528 pages. Praeger. $12.95.

She defined flowers in terms of infinity: a rose is a rose is a rose. Her description of St. Ignatius' vision of the Holy Ghost was "Pigeons on the grass, alas!" Wit, whimsy, sly associations of sound were Gertrude Stem's forte; when she got heavy or theoretical, she was unreadable. It is a truism of the Lost Generation that she influenced Hemingway's style crucially. He took her schematic use of sound patterns and transmogrified it into the spare, stylized prose that became the most pervasive literary parlance of the century. For all her celebrity as a writer, Stein's fame lies as much in her life as her work. She kept the long-running artistic crap game going for nearly 50 years in her Paris salon. Though time has adjusted some of Gertrude's accounts, reputations really were made and broken at 27, rue de Fleurus.

The other hostess there was her lover of 40 years, Alice B. Toklas. Toklas was the wife in this enduring homosexual partnership. She marketed, cooked, gardened, hired and fired the help (frequently), crocheted, talked with other wives while their husbands were listening to Stein. As Hemingway remarked, Toklas was also the executioner. When Gertrude was bored or insulted by someone, it was Alice who rang up and told the offender not to come round again.

Their lives had some of the character and texture of an oldfashioned, well-upholstered novel. It is James Mellow's achievement that he has told the story carefully and unpretentiously in clear, uncluttered prose. The evidence is that the first part was the best. When Miss Stein, the privately tutored daughter of a California stockbroker, first went to Europe in 1903, she encountered young painters--Picasso, Braque, Matisse. She and her brother Leo began buying their pictures and aggressively befriending them. She clipped The Katzenjammer Kids from home newspapers for Picasso. The famous Saturday open-house evenings began as an attempt to channel Matisse's wayward urge to drop in at any hour with troops of comrades.

After World War I, the young bohemians were international successes whose canvases Gertrude could no longer afford. The interesting new arrivals in Paris were writers, and Gertrude courted them too. But she was older, more rigid and more jealous of writing talent. There began to be in her a shadow of Proust's tyrannical salonkeeper Mme. Verdurin. Any small slight to Gertrude, even an appearance at a party in someone else's salon, was enough to send Alice to the phone with the cutoff call.

Mellow has fine vignettes from the '20s and '30s. Francis Picabia, the rich, eccentric Cuban painter--owner of 100 autos in his lifetime--darts in and out of the narrative. "If you want clean ideas, you must change them as often as your shirts," he advised Gertrude. Her triumphant American tour in 1934 is a familiar story, but Mellow has new anecdotes, such as renting a You-Drive-Yourself car in Chicago because Gertrude was enchanted by the firm's name.

She died of cancer in 1946. Her sievelike will had not provided very well for Alice, a lady who needed protection. Alice was the much beloved daughter of an autocratic San Francisco businessman. (When she woke him up to tell him that the city was in flames after the earthquake, he replied, "That will give us a black eye back East.") Alice was used to conducting her life exactly as she and Gertrude pleased, whether buying the richest of fruits from Fauchon or laboring for days over variations of a recipe.

She was truly bereft after Gertrude's death. All her sources of money dried up; the Stein family moved successfully to get the art collection away from her on the grounds that it was vulnerable to theft. She wrote a marvelous, quirky cookbook, but it did not help her circumstances. When she died seven years ago at 89, she was living off the kindness of people she had entertained years before. But one recipe--for hashish fudge--gave her a posthumous fame with the counterculture that Stein might well have resented. Gertrude, at any rate, would have given a great deal to see a movie marquee that said I LOVE YOU, GERTRUDE STEIN.

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