Gertrude Stein's Surrealist Years

By Ery Shin

Examineshow surrealism enriches our understanding of Stein’s writing through its poetics of oppositions
 
Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years brings to life Stein’s surrealist sensibilities and personal values borne from her WWII anxieties, not least of which originated in a dread of anti-Semitism. Stein’s earlier works such as Tender Buttons and Lucy Church Amiably tend to prioritize formal innovations over narrative-building and overt political motifs. However, Ery Shin argues that Stein’s later works engage more with storytelling and life-writing in startling ways—most emphatically and poignantly through the surrealist lens.
 
Beginning with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and continuing in later works, Stein renders legible her war-torn era’s jarring dystopian energies through narratives filled with hallucinatory visions, teleportation, extreme coincidences, action reversals, doppelgangers, dream sequences spanning both sleeping and waking states, and great whiffs of the occult. Such surrealist gestures are predicated on Stein’s return to the independent clause and, by extension, to plot, characterization, and anecdotes. By summoning the marvelous in a historically situated world, Stein joins her surrealist contemporaries in their own ambivalent crusade on behalf of historiography.
 
Besides illuminating Stein’s art and life, the surrealist framework developed here brings readers deeper into those philosophical ideas invoked by war. Topics of discussion emphasize how varied Jewish experiences were in Hitler’s Europe, how outliers like Stein can be included in the surrealist project, surrealism’s theoretical bind in the face of WWII, and the age-old question of artistic legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jun 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9780817392994

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Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years

Gertrude Stein’s Surrealist Years

ERY SHIN

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2020 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Scala, Baskerville and Caslon

Cover image: Liz Hui, 1,000 Perfect Circles, 9" × 11", pen and ink, 2019; courtesy of the artist

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2063-8

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9299-4

For Injoo Hwang, Yongdo Shin, and Young Kwon Shin

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Contexts

2. Ruskin’s Ghost

3. On Style

4. The Drowned

5. The Pleasures of Solipsism

6. Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

Afterword

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK THE anonymous reviewer at the journal Dada/Surrealism who gave me feedback that was tough yet so fair-minded and generous that I wrote this monograph in response. For taking an interest in my work, the University of Alabama Press’s editor-in-chief, Daniel Waterman, is someone I couldn’t be more grateful for. This book likewise could not have been completed without Arizona State University’s Sharon J. Kirsch and Hunter College’s Amy Moorman Robbins, both of whom read through drafts and invited me to speak at a number of Stein conferences. Such gestures of kindness changed my career. And then to my immediate family—Injoo Hwang, Yongdo Shin, and Young Kwon Shin—this work is also yours.

1

Contexts

IT ISN’T EASY TO FOLLOW Gertrude Stein’s stylistic evolution over the decades. Too much material exists in too many scattered editions. There is no equivalent to Faber’s The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (2011) for her. Teeming with indeterminate articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions, pronouns, and split infinitives, Stein’s early repetitive mode¹ has been interpreted as cinematic; perimathematical; battologeo; quasi-zen chanting to induce alternative psychedelic states; infantile babble; a way to empty words of meaning through sheer exhaustion; shitting; autoerotic; automatic; monologuing; antipatriarchal because strange-looking; or a punk dyke cover-up.² Stein’s later styles are thought to encompass all these descriptions and more—word-music, cubist, abstract, landscape, expressionist, futurist, antilyric, hermetic, autotelic, postmodern, anticapitalist, deconstructionist, or arbitrary enough to evoke the artifice lurking behind all language.³

Efforts to more comprehensively reconstruct the author’s stylistic progression—or just win her more airtime in university and high school classrooms—continue. But Stein’s political legacy remains another matter. In the past decade and a half, the rhetorical excesses belonging to Stein’s hagiographic readings have been compounded by what can only be called an undiscriminating backlash against her bad WWII behavior. The pendulum keeps swinging to extremes, hinting at the critic’s ongoing dilemma of treading that fine line between overstating a writer’s moral triumphs (as manifested in the sympathies elicited by this-that literary content) and taking him or her to task for personal failures offstage. Both poles miss the point of what art is: something neither necessarily begotten from an upstanding citizen nor drafted for the explicit purpose of moral instruction. It remains wearisome that some readers still expect the writer to impart feel-good wisdoms, but to indulge in the level of moralizing regarding Stein’s wartime activities that the New Yorker’s Emily Greenhouse does in Gertrude Stein and Vichy: The Overlooked History (2012) and Why Won’t the Met tell the Whole Truth about Gertrude Stein? (2012) reiterates the importance of critical discretion.

In private confidence Stein may have described herself as a Jew, orthodox background, and I never make any bones about it⁴ to her young admirer Samuel Steward—a pen pal who became a close friend, and who transitioned from being a full-time English academic to a tattoo artist-cum-pornographic writer—but her relative public silence on the Holocaust and friendship with Nazi collaborator Bernard Faÿ continue to perturb a number of readers. For that reason, one suspects, the way in which Stein’s complicated Jewish sympathies inform the tenor and subject of her later works—better yet, the way these texts reveal a surrealist sensibility enmeshed in her war-born anxieties (not least of which arose from a dread of anti-Semitism)—hasn’t been canvassed at length. Fueled by scholarship in the vein of Barbara Will’s Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011) and Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007), the unease surrounding Stein’s political bent during the Second World War has escalated to the proportion that Stein faces recurring charges of Nazi collaborationism today. Such pronouncements, in turn, raise the question of whether she qualifies as a collaborationist and how far that term can be stretched in a world where death thrives in casual abundance.

Greenhouse’s name was mentioned earlier because she encourages the public to pursue a well-meaning, if misguided, retroactive justice. When the exhibition The Steins Collect opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2012, Greenhouse reports, a group petitioned to have what they believed to be Stein’s pro-Vichy efforts highlighted in the display itself.⁵ Yet harboring some leftover fondness for Marshal Pétain as the aging Victor of Verdun (a sentiment shared by the French majority during the interwar period) and agreeing to translate him under pressure from Faÿ, a confidant upon whom, she was keenly aware, her property and personal safety depended, hardly turns Stein into a collaborationist worth prosecuting or even labeling as such. A skim through her WWII memoir Wars I Have Seen (1945) speaks volumes here. In it one can trace Stein’s growing disenchantment with Pétain, how frightened and resentful she is of German soldiers, her bewilderment at the anti-Semitism around her, her hopes for Hitler’s demise, and her poignant awareness of her own vulnerability as a Jew in occupied territory despite her American citizenship and celebrity perks. Add to these strands the predictable incompletion of Pétain’s translation project, and the overkill comes into sharper relief. Stein couldn’t even translate Georges Hugnet’s Enfances (1933), a poem less than thirty pages long, without bickering over authorial ownership, eventually falling out with Hugnet over his unwillingness to endorse her translation of his text. Her version had become so far removed from the original as to merit its own title: Before the Flowers of Friendship Faded Friendship Faded (1931).⁶ If Stein is deemed a collaborationist, then virtually anyone in France at the time could be as well.

Coming full circle, one reiterates: few sources cover Stein’s surrealist gestures in detail, much less situate them against her WWII experiences. What allusions exist are fleeting, usually affirming Stein’s interest in writing from alternative psychedelic states (although she denied relying on psychic automatism) or in reinvigorating perceptual experience from the ground up. In Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon (1988), Marianne DeKoven points out, Although Stein rejects both the Freudian subconscious and the idea of automatic writing, and in that sense is anti-surrealist, she does see her writing as proceeding from a state of trance or meditation, and therefore from depths of the mind which are capable of purer, more profound vision than the shallows of ‘normal’ consciousness.⁷ Daniel Albright extends this thread in Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (2000), not only reemphasizing Stein’s undergraduate training in automatic writing under William James’s care (an education that Albright, too, recognizes she revolted against⁸), but taking pains to mention that her cross-sensory associations exude a surrealist aura, one belying her distaste for surrealism per se:

Surrealism never did interest me, she reported, and she remembered that when she and Dalí talked, neither of us listened very much to one another. If Dalí was a bore, Tzara seemed like a pleasant and not very exciting cousin. But even in her expressions of distaste for surrealists and surrealism and automatic writing, it is possible to notice certain surrealist habits of thought. The notion that poetry is addressed to the eye and painting to the ear is exactly the sort of sensory switching that the surrealists cultivated. If her jingles are eye jingles, if her repetitions are to be enjoyed as recurrences in a visual schema on the page, if her anti-linear, sometimes asyntactic sentences force the eye to keep doubling back on words already read but not yet construed—then Stein might say, in the words of the discarded title for the calligrams, Me, I’m a painter too. Stein is a surrealist not in the Breton or Dalí tradition, but in the Apollinaire tradition—except that some of Stein’s experiments in shaped verbal textures predated Apollinaire’s.⁹

Finally, those such as Will (in an earlier work—Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of Genius [2000]) and William Wasserstrom (The Sursymamericubealism of Gertrude Stein [1975]) claim Stein under the surrealist umbrella insofar as she participated in modernism’s broader mania for estranging the world in Viktor Shklovsky’s sense.¹⁰ If, according to Shklovsky, repeated exposure to objects dulls their sensuous immediacy for us, Stein’s near-automatic writing (near in semblance, not intent) disrupts such perceptual automatization. In the eyes of Will and Wasserstrom, surrealism, a style of thinking Stein practiced despite her protests, lies at the heart of modernism, sharing many of modernism’s heroic conceptual ambitions.

It is impossible to speak of surrealism without speaking of war, the most concretely realized macrocosm for nihilistic bodily excesses prohibited (and largely unimaginable) in broad daylight. War in Stein’s era posed one of the few contexts where André Breton’s dictum of a man cut in two by the window¹¹ could be not a vision, but an everyday terror. War recontextualizes the arena of civilian order. It is meaningful that Stein confesses in Wars I Have Seen, The times are so peculiar now, so mediaeval so unreasonable that for the first time in a hundred years truth is really stranger than fiction. Any truth.¹² In war, fact bleeds into fiction (and vice versa), becoming redundant terms. As the delayed ideological child of Jacques Vaché, Breton’s earliest hero of his own generation, part of surrealism’s appeal rests in its readiness to help us come to terms with war’s initial, and thereafter intermittent, incredibility. Or, rather, it reminds us that polite reality is precisely that: polite, a carefully maintained ward against those violently seething energies Vaché so adored. One of twentieth-century France’s first unofficial performance artists, Vaché was an art student given over to role-playing and a love of the outrageously nonsensical. He abhorred canonical authors and social niceties. Before he died at the age of twenty-four, by either an accidental or a deliberate opium overdose, he taught Breton that among life’s most thrilling pleasures is the public spectacle of irrationality. Breton was to repeatedly return to the anecdote about his friend trying to fire into the audience of Apollinaire’s play Les mamelles de Tirésias on June 24, 1917. For what is more conspicuously irrational than such acts of terrorism? War simply enlarges the scale of the game. Everything is surrealism, and so nothing need be named thus. The movement halts before its final goal: to render itself gratuitous—not even realism, but reality itself.¹³

Originally motivated by Stein’s own questions regarding WWII, this book has eventually become a rumination on how war’s oppositional logic informs Stein’s surrealist imagination, that is, how surrealism enriches our understanding of Stein’s last decade through its poetics of oppositions. In the 1930s and 1940s, especially for a Jewish American expatriate residing in France, surrealism rendered the era’s radically dystopian energies legible but also imbued with a sense of their own erasure. The self negating the self; wandering against a backdrop of increasingly limited freedoms; circumventing time altogether; a civilization of lonely loners—to be clear, such paradoxical strands aren’t framed by Breton’s revolutionism. Rather than drawing out life’s possibilities, they epitomize Stein’s urgent, if ambivalent, return to the historical. From The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) onward, Stein outwardly repudiates narrative writing even as she translates her experiences of storytelling’s world-shaping force—on celebrity, on the Aryan ideal—in the language of the marvelous. Put another way, and Stein’s fondness for repetitive variations courts restatements of this sort, if The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas spurred Stein’s thoughts on memorialization, storytelling assumes a more urgent role in Stein’s later works, penned in the world of Hitler’s absolutist fables. Within such a political atmosphere, Stein’s focus on life writing complicated her ongoing discomfort with Aristotelian time and literary norms. As the dreamlike phenomenon of war deepened around her, Stein began engaging more strenuously with history rather than dwelling on the ahistorical—what Stein called the continuous present, then the entity or human mind mentality. Mixed sentiments regarding the individual set adrift from a historically situated community gradually diluted her solipsistic motifs (withdrawn protagonists professing to dyschronometria). War, for Stein as for countless others, normalized the extraordinary. Within its confines, Stein began to revalue the presence of others and temporal units.

Establishing the premise for this evolution, this chapter traces Stein’s personal connections with individual surrealists as well as the movement’s broader ideas, while the next homes in on how she shared surrealism’s hyperboles regarding the artist’s ability to transcribe his or her thoughts. More specifically, the second chapter, Ruskin’s Ghost, examines how John Ruskin’s advice to see the world as though for the first time trickles down to us through Cézanne, the Goncourt brothers, Picasso, the surrealists, and Stein—in her works such as Tender Buttons (1914), Pictures (1935), and Picasso (1938). In her haste to leave behind yesterday’s art forms, she sought inspiration from photography, film recording, and collage without grasping their roots in the imagination. While critics such as Christopher J. Knight in The Patient Particulars: American Modernism and the Technique of Originality (1995) have already noted that Stein’s pursuit of Ruskin’s ideal was always a quixotic one,¹⁴ chapter 2 situates her quest in the surrealist context. Even as Knight covers Tender Buttons and Picasso, he departs from Stein’s early typological works and William James’s influence as opposed to Pictures, impressionist thought (an allusion to Monet notwithstanding), and the surrealists as this book does.¹⁵

Chapter 3 builds upon such tensions between what Stein perceived to be artificial as opposed to excitingly authentic art. After enunciating those differences between Stein’s prose and that belonging to her surrealist contemporaries, the chapter pores over Stein’s stylistic ideal: the aforementioned human mind or entity writing. This mode entails recording sensory impressions and stray thoughts from a place of absolute emotional detachment. Though impossible to realize in practice, this mind-set valiantly attempts to minimize the writer’s sense of time, personal history, kinship, and feelings in general. (Never mind that these factors allow the writer to want to write in the first place.) Ultimately, discussing Stein’s aesthetic standards sharpens our appreciation of where, and how, her later works obscure them.

Shifting from Stein’s theories to her life, chapter 4 surveys the recent controversy surrounding her political conservatism. Without clarifying that she very much identified as a Jew (if in her own secular way), and that she never harbored Nazi sympathies, this book would fall apart. The Drowned chapter foregrounds the argument that Stein can be seen as a surrealist writer, because it delineates the biographical circumstances that would have rendered the movement appealing to her. The last two chapters, then, settle around her surrealist gestures themselves. With sustained reference to Stein’s last memoirs—Paris France (1940), Wars I Have Seen—chapters 5 and 6 focus on different aspects of Stein’s fabulously war-inflected solipsism. In chapter 5, Stein’s heroine Ida, a character somewhere between a Husserlian phenomenologist and Shakespearean misanthrope, leads readers along an exercise in futility for much of the 1941 eponymous novel. Itinerant, potentially attracted to both sexes,¹⁶ and schizophrenic, Ida both embodies the spirit behind Stein’s most hermetic manner of writing and attempts to act out its purest expression: utter aloneness. She personifies the solipsistic energies that Stein aligns with the child figure, dreaming of becoming a world unto herself—a world, not incidentally, already claimed by children in that its war-torn state results from infantile aggression. Warfare, Stein observes, is conducted by overgrown boys who don’t know any better. Chapter 6 likewise revolves around a childlike solipsist, but the pleasures of solipsism sour even more for Mrs. Reynolds’s Angel Harper (a proxy for Adolf Hitler). Within the nightmarishly marvelous world of war he himself spawns, he gradually succumbs to Father Time, to everyone’s relief.

The afterword gathers all of these strands back under surrealism’s dream motif. It helped Stein come to terms with her life in occupied France. Beyond providing a convenient analogy for war, the dream illuminates the movement’s intimately intertwined solipsistic and sadistic undercurrents that clear the ground for military carnage in the first place—however unconsciously, and not a little ironically, considering surrealism’s backlash against the First World War. As a final addendum, the conclusion visits Stein’s friendship with the surrealist René Crevel. His death created another moment for pause—this time, regarding those oppositions underlying all life itself.

Although Stein never identified as a surrealist proper, being averse to Breton’s publicity stunts and macho bravura (which isn’t to say she herself was immune to the kind of publicity mongering she accused the surrealists of), her expatriate existence brought her in touch with a number of surrealist practitioners and luminaries. Among them were Breton’s personal hero Guillaume Apollinaire, Salvador Dalí, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Le Corbusier (who built a house for Stein’s eldest brother, Michael, in the Parisian suburbs), Pavel Tchelitchew, Bravig Imbs, Francis Rose, Hugnet, Pierre de Massot (who penned the preface for Stein’s Dix Portraits [1930], a collection released in France by Hugnet’s family-funded press Les Editions de la Montagne),¹⁷ Crevel, and, although more peripherally involved in the movement, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Yes, she described Breton as a buffoon who prized anything to which he can sign his name,¹⁸ yet still monitored his movements and welcomed him into her home on a regular basis. (Breton, on his end, returned Stein’s latent hostilities by never naming her as a founding influence. He acknowledged Picasso, Picabia [when they weren’t quarreling], Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Max Ernst, and Man Ray as kings of the visual realm. Comte de Lautréamont, Arthur Rimbaud, Germain Nouveau, Alfred Jarry, Sigmund Freud, Raymond Roussel, the Marquis de Sade, and Apollinaire reign, in turn, as kings of the verbal.¹⁹ Nowhere does Stein’s name enter—or any woman’s, really.) Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Stein was on friendly terms with a number of surrealists as individuals. For these younger artists and writers, Stein’s residence was a glamorously cozy beacon in the Parisian scene. For Stein, being among the surrealists had the unspoken benefit of keeping her abreast of the latest avant-garde trends.

Despite her harsh words reserved for Breton in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, they became friendly enough by the late 1930s for Stein to throw garden parties at Bilignin for him. Steward, then a budding English academic visiting Stein during the summer of 1937, recalls his host uttering the following right before Breton, Yves Tanguy, Roberto Matta, and their cohorts arrived one afternoon for punch and nibbles:

Well, the first thing is Andre Breton, he’s about as big as I am, and he’s the leader and everybody has to kowtow to him, and certainly you must because he founded surrealism, but don’t genuflect. As for me, I won’t kowtow, we meet as equals. And then there’s Yves Tanguy, he’s all tangled up but he’s a nice person. And Matta who comes from Chile and really can paint and he’s the handsomest of the lot. Then there will be Madame Breton or at least I guess that’s what she is and they have a little girl – well, they’ll all be coming and who knows who else – and it’ll be quite a crowd and the Rops will be here too. Oh my god, I hate parties like this I really do, and people will be taking pictures and spilling punch all over everything the drunker they get.²⁰

It’s easy to imagine that something from the conversations shared during such occasions must have lingered with Stein.

In drawing inspiration from the movement’s ideas without necessarily publicizing the case, Stein joins the ranks of women such as Hélène Smith, Aloïse Corbaz, Anna Zemánková, and Unica Zürn, who practiced surrealism without the Parisian in-crowd’s knowledge or recognition.²¹ More broadly yet, Stein’s surrealist gestures recall all the others performed by countless women circulating in Breton’s midst: Meret Oppenheim, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, Dora Maar, Emilia Medková, Ithell Colquhoun, Helen Lundeberg, Lee Miller, Kay Sage, Eileen Agar, Valentine Penrose, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, Rachel Baes, Edith Rimmington, Toyen, Marion Adnams, Elisa Breton, Nusch Éluard, Valentine Hugo, Grace Pailthorpe, Sonia Mossé, Maria Martins, Denise Bellon, Yolande Oliviero, and Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid. Most of these women, and those who followed (e.g., Emmy Bridgwater, Penny Slinger, Jane Graverol, Mimi Parent, Francesca Woodman, Eva Švankmajerová, Lola Alvarez Bravo, Josette Exandier, Cindy Sherman), were overshadowed by their male counterparts, who tended to treat women more as muses than professional equals.²² So besides being the rare writer among female surrealists, Stein cuts an impressive figure for the esteem she commanded from men in a man’s world. One is reminded of how charming, charismatic, and self-assured she must have been at her prime: older than most surrealists by roughly two decades, financially secure, with an intimidating educational background.

This being said, the differences between Stein and Breton’s crowd were real. Beyond personality and generational frictions, Stein’s distaste for surrealism stemmed from some misunderstandings regarding the movement itself. Breton’s perceived sanctimoniousness didn’t help. Neither did the hypermasculine cult of psychic automatism his circle practiced in its earliest days. Yet Stein also often unfairly identified surrealism with a certain subset of painting. Surrealism became, in her hands, an exclusively visual phenomenon gaining momentum in the 1920s. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, surrealism is reduced to an amateurish skirting around a mystically inflected abstract expressionist ideal:

The Surréalistes are the vulgarization of Picabia as Delaunay and his followers and the futurists were the vulgarization of Picasso. Picabia had conceived and is struggling with the problem that a line should have the vibration of a musical sound and that this vibration should be the result of conceiving the human form and the human face in so tenuous a fashion that it would induce such vibration in the line forming it. It is his way of achieving the disembodied. It was this idea that conceived mathematically influenced Marcel Duchamp and produced his The Nude Descending the Staircase.

All his life Picabia has struggled to dominate and achieve this conception. Gertrude Stein thinks that perhaps he is now approaching the solution of his problem. The surréalistes taking the manner for the matter as is the way of the vulgarizers, accept the line as having become vibrant and as therefore able in itself to inspire them to higher flights. He who is going to be the creator of the vibrant line knows that it is not yet created and if it were it would not exist by itself, it would be dependent upon the emotion of the object which compels the vibration. So much for the creator and his followers.²³

Commending the vibrant—an apt adjective for her own writing style, which constantly slides off the syntactical grid—Stein implies that surrealism, including its literary branch, feels too polished, too vapid. And in two paragraphs, she severs Picabia and Duchamp from both surrealism and futurism, notwithstanding their reciprocal influence, valorizing a conflated version of impressionism and abstract expressionism in the process. These arbitrary divisions become all the more disconcerting considering how profoundly Picabia and Duchamp shared futurism’s investment in overlaying stop-motion stills, exemplified in Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). Stein retreated from the Italians, who’re deemed underwhelming, even very dull.²⁴ The young Frenchmen bustling around Apollinaire receive similarly unsympathetic treatment in Toklas’s pseudo-memoir: I can so well remember the first time Gertrude Stein took me to see Guillaume Apollinaire. It was a tiny bachelor’s apartment on the rue des Martyrs. The room was crowded with a great many small young gentlemen. Who, I asked Fernande, are all these little men. They are poets, answered Fernande. I was overcome. I had never seen poets before, one poet yes but not poets.²⁵ Stein’s affected deference for these little men, the soon-to-be surrealists, makes plain her disdain for most of Paris’s intelligentsia at the time, Marinetti and Pound included.

Apollinaire remains another matter, being one of the few whose memory never soured for Stein. Stein’s fondness for Apollinaire is apparent from his sizable presence in The Autobiography of Alice. B Toklas. Sixteen years Breton’s senior, and the man who allegedly coined the term surrealism,²⁶ Guillaume epitomized its spirit for Breton and Stein alike. Guillaume Apollinaire, Stein writes, on the contrary was very wonderful.²⁷ He is very attractive, very interesting, a regular Caesar in looks (no small compliment from a writer who took pride in being compared to the Roman emperors of old), with finely cut florid features, dark hair and a beautiful complexion.²⁸ He is deemed heroic in his military volunteering.²⁹ Praise for Apollinaire’s brilliance and lovability continues with: [Guillaume was] extraordinarily brilliant and no matter what subject was started, if he knew anything about it or not, he quickly saw the whole meaning of the thing and elaborated it by his wit and fancy carrying it further than anybody knowing anything about it could have done, and oddly enough generally correctly.³⁰ Or the equally admiring: Nobody but Guillaume [. . .] could make fun of his hosts, make fun of their guests, make fun of their food and spur them to always greater and greater effort.³¹ Apollinaire brought people together, teaching the Delauneys how to cook and how to live.³² Even during the First World War, he remained a comfort to Stein, writing her amusing letters on falling off of horses in the endeavour to become an artillery-man.³³

Apollinaire was a man ahead of his time, a debonair tastemaker. Writing as Toklas, Stein recounts seeing him mingling with an aristocratic crowd at a showing of The Rite of Spring (1913): "He was dressed in evening clothes and he was industriously kissing various important looking ladies’ hands. He was the first one of his crowd to come out into the great world wearing evening clothes and kissing hands. We were very amused and very pleased to see him do it. It was the first time we had seen him doing it. After the war they