The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (review)

In January of 1926, the twenty-nine-year-old composer and critic Virgil Thomson met Gertrude Stein, then fifty-one, a writer of hermetic texts and well-known member of the transatlantic modernist avant-garde. The two Americans met in Paris at 27 rue de Fleurus, where Stein and her life partner Alice B. Toklas made their home, maintained their atelier of modern art (much of it by friends like Picasso and Matisse), and presided over a celebrated literary and artistic salon.

At their first meeting, Stein let it be known that she was interested in seeing more of Thomson. He was trenchant and plainspoken, a Kansas City native who had made his way to Harvard, where he discovered Stein's work, and then to Paris. Small of stature and already balding, Thomson was strong minded, incisive, witty, and perceived in terms of the type then known as "pansy." Stein was strong minded, charismatic, and imperious, and partook of masculine prerogatives in her appearance, social manner, and claims to literary genius.

Thomson immediately spoke to Stein of her writing and his prior attempts to set it to music. On New Year's Day 1927, he presented Stein with a setting of her short poem "Susie Asado" for soprano and piano. In March he proposed, and she accepted, an operatic collaboration, and by June Stein sent Thomson a manuscript, soon to be titled Four Saints in Three Acts. Though it did not resemble a libretto in any conventional sense, Thomson declared the text ideal to his artistic requirements. Some forty years later in his autobiography, he described Stein's words as perfect for his purposes of solving the problem of English musical prosody. The semantic abstractness of the words allowed the composer to focus on their sound and syntax, free from temptation toward text painting and distortion of natural speech rhythms, accents, and intonation.

Thomson and Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts solved the prosody problem, but its spectacular success entailed far more than this. And their collaboration came to entail more than Four Saints, including eventually two important modernist operas and great critical and public acclaim, a twenty-year friendship, and one of the most significant high-arts partnerships of the century. This artistic collaboration is the basis for scholarly and readerly interest in correspondence the pair exchanged from their first meeting until Stein's death in 1946. But further factors enhance the appeal of the first collection, edited by University of Windsor (Canada) professors Susan Holbrook and Thomas Dilworth, of all of the collaborators' roughly 400 extant letters, postcards, cables, couriered messages, and pneumatic petits bleus, as well as a series of letters from 1933 to 1934 in which Stein's agent W. A. Bradley serves as go-between, and an epilogue (pp. 279-302) comprising the correspondence of Thomson and Toklas during her years of solitary widowhood (1946-1967).

Among other things, there is Stein and Thomson's queerness and its inscriptions in their collaborative and individual work, as discussed in a range of recent scholarship. Also of interest is their enmeshment in international circles of twentieth-century artistic and literary luminaries as friends, lovers, colleagues, and rivals. And there is the fact that both artists were extraordinary conversationalists and writers, capable of turning an apt and memorable phrase. Thomson in 1928, for example, reported to Stein on a visit from their friend Bravig Imbs and his bride. "Bravig seems proud and contented, though he treats her more like a new suit than like a wife. Still, he was always careful of his clothes" (pp. 88-89).

Testament to the epistolary interest surrounding these figures includes the previously published volumes of Thomson's letters to various recipients and of his correspondence with friends in the San Francisco Bay area, and of correspondence between Stein and Sherwood Anderson, Mabel Dodge, Pablo Picasso, Carl Van Vechten...