From the art collection that she amassed with her brother Leo, to the salons that brought together everyone from Picasso and F Scott Fitzgerald to Thornton Wilder and Matisse, there are lots of ways to talk about Gertrude Stein without talking about her actual body of work. Yet Stein wrote everything from opera libretto and poetry collections to plays and nigh-on-impenetrable doorstop novels, capturing the complexities of language and identity in ways that still feel transgressive.
Though arguably there is no easy way into Stein's vast body of work even some of her most accessible writing pushes against literary conventions The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas is a good place to begin. The pseudo-autobiography tells the story of the eponymous figure Stein's life partner while also telling the author's own story. Divisive among Stein's close circle on publication (Hemingway called it a pitiful book), Toklas is a work of surprising simplicity: there's a clarity to the language and a lightness of touch that stops Stein's approach to form from being too overwhelming. Stein's writing has the power to make the familiar seem strange, imbuing the ordinary with magic. In Everybody's Autobiography, she said of her home town, Oakland in California, there is no there there, the meaning of which is still being reconsidered and contested. The poetry collection Tender Buttons is all about Stein's ability to play with language. Divided into three sections Objects, Food, and Rooms the collection pushes words to their breaking point, somewhere between stream of consciousness and cubist painting. The transformative power of Stein's work in a piece like A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass is the perfect reference when another round of wine is poured at the table.
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