Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

The publication of first-rate biographies of Sherwood Anderson, Nella Larsen, and Upton Sinclair and of a number of biographical essays on other authors indicates that interest in authors’ lives and cultural contexts continues to grow. In addition, Claude McKay, Susan Glaspell, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Thomas Dixon are the subjects of single-author studies or special issues of journals. Work on writers of the Harlem Renaissance, especially Larsen, McKay, and James Weldon Johnson, focuses increasingly on issues of performance, visual culture, music, and technology. Somewhat surprising, however, is the relatively small number of articles on other writers, with only a few essays published on Sinclair Lewis, Sui Sin Far, and John Dos Passos and none at all on H. L. Mencken, Zane Grey, or Abraham Cahan.

i Gertrude Stein

Stein’s life and the evasive measures she took to preserve her privacy are the subject of Janet Malcolm’s “Strangers in Paradise: How Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Got to Heaven” (New Yorker 13 Nov.: 54–61). To illustrate Stein’s deeply felt but rarely acknowledged sense of Jewish identity, Malcolm relates an incident that occurred in late 1944, when Stein, asked whether a young Jewish boy should be adopted by a Gentile couple in order to hide him, responded that he must only be adopted by a Jewish family, seemingly despite the danger to the boy. This sense of identity led Stein to leave her paintings to a nephew instead of to Alice B. Toklas, who had the life use of them, a situation that ultimately caused problems for Toklas. In writing of Toklas’s late conversion to Roman Catholicism and her belief that she would see Stein in heaven, an idea inconsistent with Jewish tradition, Malcolm finds that both women were circumspect about their Jewishness because of the rampant anti-Semitism of their times and the danger to their lives posed by being Jewish in occupied France. Contending that Alice B. Toklas, though always mentioned in biographical accounts of Stein, receives too little credit for Stein’s literary production, Anna Linzie seeks to provide a more balanced account in The True Story of Alice B. Toklas: A Comparative Study of Three Autobiographies (Iowa). While she stops short of reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as Toklas’s work instead of Stein’s, Linzie uses theoretical models of lesbian autobiography, Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry, unpublished manuscripts, and the recollections of those who knew both Stein and Toklas to read The Autobiography as a double-voiced, if not double-authored, production. Reading this work in the context of Toklas’s famous cookbook and her memoir What Is Remembered, argues Linzie, brings into clearer focus Toklas’s functions as amanuensis and literary enabler (in a positive sense) for Stein’s work and allows Toklas to emerge from critical invisibility.

Stein’s life also provides a means for interpreting her work. In “Presence, Deixis, and the Making of Meaning in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons” (UTQ 75: 946–56) Markus Poetzsch contends that the great number of deictic words in Stein’s text point to the place where interpretation should lie: outside the text itself, in Stein’s life and the description of her creative processes left by Mabel Dodge, Sherwood Anderson, and others who wrote their impressions of her. Similarly, in “Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding and the Space of Letters” ( JML 29, iv: 99–123) Logan Esdale proposes that Everybody’s Autobiography should actually be read as a letter or newsletter about Stein’s life. Noting the similarities between Stein’s text and Laura Riding’s little-known Everybody’s Letters, which Riding said constituted “everybody’s autobiography,” Esdale sees in the epistolary qualities of Everybody’s Autobiography a space in which Stein could both respond to her audience and retreat from it. Referring as it does to a long tradition of “letter books” and appearing during Riding’s friendship with Stein during the late 1920s, Riding’s book suggested to Stein the intimacy implied by letters yet the space of difference evoked by the letter form. Stein’s career as a...