Questions and Answers

“My Mesdames began preparing for it months in advance. They placed orders for new dresses, gloves and shoes. Nothing was extravagant, but everything was luxurious, waistcoats embroidered with flowers and several kinds of birds, traveling outfits in handsome tweeds with brown velvet trims and buttons, shoes identical except for the heels and the size.”

– THE BOOK OF SALT (2003) by Monique Truong

Seventy-five years ago today, GertrudeandAlice arrived in San Francisco as part of their 1934-35 U.S. lecture tour.  They drove from Los Angeles in a rental car. (Gertrude had been introduced to the concept of car rentals on a Chicago stop and was fascinated by it.)

Gertrude had not been in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than forty years and Alice returned after leaving for Paris in 1907.

For eleven days they were regaled by the City staying at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill and spending the days at luncheons and lectures and visiting some of the places they had known many of which had changed since the 1906 fire and earthquake.

In the Appendix of the incredible compilation, THE LETTERS OF GERTRUDE STEIN AND THORNTON WILDER ( Yale University Press, 1996),  edited by Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns, there is a comprehensive itinerary of the 1934-35  tour prepared by William Rice.

Here is an overview of the days they spent in the Bay Area.  On the days when Gertrude gave a lecture, I’ve included the first and last lines of the lecture. Though Gertrude limited the size of her audiences to no more than 500 people, the lectures were so popular that by January of 1935, Random House had published a book featuring them – 3,400 copies were printed.

• April 8 (Monday) – Arrive in San Francisco.  Gertrude in EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

“Then slowly we came into San Francisco it was frightening quite frightening driving there and on top of Nob Hill where we were to stay, of course it had not been like that and yet it was like that, Alice Toklas found it natural but for me it was a trouble yes it was, it did make me fell uncomfortable.”

 

• April 9 -A visit with California’s grande dame of literature, another Gertrude, Gertrude Atherton, including a trip to a Dominican convent where Atherton’s daughter was teaching. According to Stein again from  EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY: “She [Atherton] had spoken to the girls the year before and she had asked what they wanted her to talk about and they said Gertrude Stein that she had been astonished that they would be interested in my writing but they were.”

Also the P.E.N. dinner at the Bohemian Club, the guests of Atherton.

• April 10 – Lecture for the English Club of Stanford University. 1st Narration lecture:

“It is a rather curious thing that it should take a hundred years to change anything that is to change something, it is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years and that makes a grandfather a grandmother to a grandson or a granddaughter if it happens right and it often does happen right…

I like the feeling of words doing as they want to do and as they have to do when they live where they have to live that is where they have come to live which of course they do do.”

• April 11 – Lecture for the San Francisco Women’s City Club, “What Is English Literature:”

“One cannot come back too often to the question what is knowledge and to the answer knowledge is what one knows…

And so this is the history of English literature of all the writing written in English as I understand it.”

• April 12 – Another lecture  at the Women’s City Club, “Pictures”:

“It is natural that I should tell about pictures, that is, about paintings.  Everybody must like something and I like seeing painted pictures…

All this is very important because it is important. It is important not for the painter or for the writer but for those who like to look at paintings and who like to know what an oil painting is and who like to know what bothers them in what an oil painting is.  I hope I have been making it slowly clear to you.  I might have told you more in detail but in that case you would that is to say I would not have been as clearly seen as I do now what an oil painting is.”

Gertrude also received the key to the City from Mayor Angelo Rossi. (It would be fascinating to know where it was displayed once they returned to Paris and what ever happened to it.)

• April 13 – A busy day. Gertrude’s article “American Food and American Houses,” published by the Herald Tribune Syndicate.

“Poetry and Grammar,” lecture presented at Mills College in Oakland:

“What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose.

There is no use in telling more than you know, no not even if you do not know it…

Do you see what I mean. Well anyway that is the way that I do now feel about it and this is all that I do know, and I do believe in knowing all that I do know, about prose and poetry. The rest will come considerably later.”

They then visited Gertrude’s Oakland neighborhood which resulted in the oft misinterpreted “there, there” quote.

• April 14 – Nothing appears on the itinerary. Maybe Gertrude just slept in and Alice went shopping?

• April 15 – Had lunch in honor of University of California-Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society members and Gertrude again presents her first “Narration” lecture at the university.

• April 16 – Lunch at the home of  prominent banker and art collector  William H. Crocker and his wife.

• April 17 – “Pictures” lecture at Stanford.

• April 18 – Must have been another rest day as nothing appears on the intinerary.

• April 19 – They take a night flight to Chicago via Omaha.

GertrudeandAlice would remain in the U.S. until May 4th, spending most of their time in New York City.

“GertrudeStein, unflappable, unrepentant, unbowed, stares back at me and smiles.  This photograph of her and Miss Toklas, the second of two that I have of that day, was taken on the deck of the SS Champlian.  It captures my Mesdames perfectly.  I am over there, the one with my back turned to the camera.  I am not bowing at GertrudeStein’s feet.  I am sewing the button back onto her right shoe.  The button had come loose in the excitement of coming aboard ship.”

– THE BOOK OF SALT (2003) by Monique Truong

COPYRIGHT HANS GALLAS ©2010

Tagged Bohemian Club, Edward Burns, Gertrude Atherton, Gertrude Stein, Mark Hopkins Hotel, Mayor Angelo Rossi, Mayor LaGuardia, Mills College, Monique Truong, San Francisco Women's City Club, Stanford University, The Book of Salt, Thornton Wilder, Ulla Dydo, University of California-Berkeley, William H. Crocker, William Rice