{"id":1949774,"date":"2026-05-22T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1949774"},"modified":"2026-05-22T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T06:00:00","slug":"two-of-modernisms-lesbian-icons-get-the-novel-treatment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1949774","title":{"rendered":"Two of Modernism\u2019s Lesbian Icons Get the Novel Treatment"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Alice_B._Toklas_and_Gertrude_Stein_1922_Man_Ray.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tIn Paris\u2019s 20th arrondissement, there is a park, of sorts, where the city\u2019s greatest revolutionaries go to rot. Some are the real deal: On May 28, 1871, over a hundred Communards were shot dead right here as dreams of a Socialist utopia crumbled around them. Other legends were made not on barricades, but on the stage\u2014or the page. Oscar Wilde, for example, reposes beneath a hulking deity whose iconoclastic castration, back in 1961, did little to restrain pilgrims seeking to smear red lips across his stony physique. Proust\u2019s is a surprisingly succinct slab\u2014simple, black, nonchalant\u2014while Apollinaire\u2019s is a rusticated obelisk, phallic and craggy, branded with the ghost of a cross. The women\u2019s quarters are more modest: It is hard to imagine Isadora Duncan, arms outstretched and tunic flying, confined to such a small stone plaque; Colette fairs a little better, her red-veined resting place the size of a cushy twin bed. The avant-garde is dead, and it is buried in P\u00e8re Lachaise.<\/p>\n

\n\tWind your way back through gravelly paths and you\u2019ll see a squat grey tombstone. It is near here that we find the unnamed narrator of Deborah Levy\u2019s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein<\/em> reflecting, early in the book, that she is \u201cworking too hard\u201d for the titular woman lying beneath it. For months, the narrator has been living in Paris as she tries, and fails, to finish an essay on the self-declared \u201ccreative literary mind of the century.\u201d Though Stein brings her no small amount of malaise, the narrator feels it is her \u201cdestiny to defend her.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Gertrude Stein poses in front of Picasso\u2019s 1906 portrait of her in her Paris apartment, n.d. <\/span>AFP via Getty Images<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tDefend her from what? Known for prose that resisted norms of easy intelligibility, and for a life that flouted expectations about how a woman should look and love, her tombstone might have read the \u201cTyphoid Mary of Prose Style,\u201d the \u201cHigh Priestess of the Cult of Unintelligibility,\u201d and \u201cThe Ogress of the rue de Fleurus\u201d\u2014to borrow from the epithets collected by her most recent biographer, Francesca Wade. The last is reference to the apartment Stein kept with the woman she called her wife, Alice B. Toklas, in which they hosted some of the most famous names in twentieth-century art and literature: Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound.<\/p>\n

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tYes, remarks those catty modernists made about their host could be less than savory, but Stein wasn\u2019t bothered. She surrounded herself with greats, and she saw herself on top: \u201cThink of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me,\u201d she encouraged her audience.<\/p>\n

\n\tLingering in a downpour at P\u00e8re Lachaise, our narrator makes a less canonical comparison. Brandishing an \u201coozing baguette,\u201d she \u201cdevour[s] it there and then amongst the dead.\u201d (Call it: a Moveable Feast.) No match for its slippery interior, the bread\u2019s \u201csalty grey rind, like ash, had cracked from the sheer life force of this fast-flowing river of cheese. If the rind was the frame, this Brie like Gertrude Stein had burst through it.\u201d It was Stein\u2019s project, according to Levy, to \u201cbreak through the conventions of genre,\u201d but I would wager that the 20th-century master of the quizzical comparison would not stand for a set piece buttressed by such a sloppy simile.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe avowed velocity and vitality of Brie aside, this was not the first, nor the last, time in My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein<\/em> that I was struck by an assertion so bald, or a metaphor so incontinent, that I wondered whether it was written in earnest. There are blanket statements about modern art that I would not forgive from even the uninitiated undergraduate: \u201cCubism had made the invisible visible. That\u2019s what it takes to be modern. To see it first.\u201d Or, in answer to the question of what \u201cmodernist art [\u2026] had lost\u201d: \u201cRepresentation. Naturalism. Nostalgia. Obedience. Conformity. Certainty.\u201d Stein may have found commas, as Levy suggests, \u201cservile,\u201d but this pile of periods progresses in the kind of cocksurity that she suggests Modernism has already killed off, its staccato bravado a technical flourish compensating for a lack of argument.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd yet, the fragile surety of that parataxis is stylistically undercut by the nebulous musings attached to one exceptionally promiscuous metaphor. Streams trickle into, and eventually flood, My Year in Paris<\/em>, justified by one historical kernel: Stein, we learn, took classes at Radcliffe College with the psychologist William James, who coined the term \u201cstream of consciousness\u201d in 1890. Mirroring the unmoored days of the narrator\u2019s expat year, the narrator pictures \u201cstreams [\u2026] flowing through the nineteenth century into the twenty-first and all over the place.\u201d All over the place is appropriately indefinite, for in the pages that follow, streams don\u2019t just run through \u201cmodernism\u201d but also \u201cunder the mowed and manicured golf courses on which men swing their clubs in the twenty-first century.\u201d Their currents pull in unsuspecting poets (\u201csomewhere in a field alongside the streams in the nineteenth century was Walt Whitman\u201d), unwanted clothes (\u201cThankfully her corset was now floating down one of the streams of consciousness\u201d), macroeconomic shifts (\u201cIndustrialisation is also floating in the streams of consciousness\u201d), and one hapless cat. These figurative streams are a little too klepto for my taste, but their eclectic purloining feels of apiece with the indiscriminate rush of the act in which the narrator often catches herself: \u201cscrolling, scrolling, scrolling.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI am not so precious as to demand plot from literary fiction\u2014Stein, after all, wanted to save language from its teleological subservience to meaning\u2014but My Year in Paris<\/em> reads like one long lazy river. Levy\u2019s books can cut; this one merely oozes. With its grand suppositions about the nature of Modernism juxtaposed against metaphors acting as alibis for a facile associationism, it is difficult to see what My Year in Paris<\/em> is trying to do\u2014much less resist.<\/p>\n

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\n\tIt was something of a relief, then, to pick up Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain\u2019s debut novel Bone Horn,<\/em> a fast-paced penny dreadful in which the gambit is given on the opening page: What was Toklas hiding behind those razor-sharp bangs? An unnamed academic-turned-private-investigator (she was after more flexible hours) goes on the hunt for her literal horn. The discovery could change the face of Modernism, or it could just change the face of a member best known for being ventriloquized in Stein\u2019s misleadingly titled Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.<\/em> Digging around for evidence, our narrator must dodge lusty archivists (a stash of gloves in Yale\u2019s Beinecke Library is repurposed for handling things more sensitive than documents), dom cops (there is Tender Buttons,<\/em> and then there is \u201cTITS\u201d: \u201cTighten. Investigate. Tighten. Secure\u201d), and needy\u2014and possibly homicidal\u2014academics. Returning once again to\u2014where else?\u2014P\u00e8re Lachaise, we find our detective at the duo\u2019s double grave googling questions like \u201cDo academics ever kill one another?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGoogling seems to be this Sherlock\u2019s greatest strength: bought books go unread and archival boxes remain shut as the narrator pinballs from tab to tab. \u201cIs this your investigative style? Just google it?\u201d one archivist asks, incredulous. Perhaps this is why, despite the expected drama (\u201cPeople have died in pursuit of the horn\u201d) and crime show allusions, this search can feel as aimless as Levy\u2019s streams, and no more thrilling. It is just not that interesting, it turns out, to follow a detective\u2019s scroll of consciousness\u2014or a writer\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt is perhaps surprising to learn that among its most devoted readers, the genre of detective fiction could count Gertrude Stein, said to have gone through a mystery a day. Perhaps the author attempting to rewire language found a formulaic plot comforting; perhaps she just enjoyed a puzzle as tough as her prose-poems. And yet, what her writing had in common with the whodunit is a sense of careful composition combined with a resistance to immediate understanding. My Year in Paris,<\/em> by contrast, trades on an elusiveness that can feel, at times, like a cover for objectlessness, while the propulsion of Bone Horn<\/em> doesn\u2019t outlive its pulpy premise. I was left wondering whether Stein really needed a white knight from beyond the grave. Her case closed with the casket: \u201cDead is dead,\u201d she wrote, \u201cbut that is why memory is all and all the immortality there is.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/gertrue-stein-alice-b-toklas-novels-deborah-levy-prudence-bussey-chamberlain-lesbian-icons-modernism-1234786650\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Alice_B._Toklas_and_Gertrude_Stein_1922_Man_Ray.jpg?w=1024″] In Paris\u2019s 20th arrondissement, there is a park, of sorts, where the city\u2019s greatest revolutionaries go to rot. Some are the real deal: On May 28, 1871, over a hundred Communards were shot dead right here as dreams of a Socialist utopia crumbled around them. Other legends were made not on barricades, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1949774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1949774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1949774\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1949774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1949774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1949774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}