Word: leos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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JOURNEY INTO THE SELF: BEING THE LETTERS, PAPERS AND JOURNALS OF LEO STEIN (331 pp.)-Edited by Edmund Fuller-Crown...
Gertrude Stein was merely Leo Stein's tag-along sister for the first half of their lives: in Pittsburgh, where they were born; in Vienna and California, where they were brought up, and in Paris, where they went to live. Until they were in their 30s, it was Leo who was the clever one. He knew about ideas and he knew about pictures, and he told Gertrude. Then, to Leo's astonishment, Gertrude began to turn into a genius. People began to take her inspired gobbledygook seriously, and she began to buy Picasso's new cubist paintings...
...turned out that she was on to a winner. After World War I, Hemingway and the crowd who read and wrote for Eugene Jolas' magazine transition flocked admiringly round Gertrude, the great writer. People who liked pictures came to look at her collection. Leo had turned into Gertrude's dim brother...
...What a Liar!" He stayed that way. This collection of letters and excerpts from his journals, printed with fragments of an autobiography and part of an unfinished book (Leo died in 1949), shows mainly how bitterly he resented it. Many of the letters are petulant complaints about Gertrude's success. "I simply cannot take Gertrude seriously as a literary phenomenon." The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas riled him especially. "God what a liar she is!" One of the last things he wrote was a memorandum about his dislike of her and all her works. In 1946, when he heard...
...unfinished autobiography and the unfinished book will not do much to change Leo's status. The autobiography shows him to be an arrogant dilettante claiming an exhaustive knowledge of subjects with which he had had the briefest brushes. At 22, he dismissed history as inaccurate rubbish. At 28, he put all the philosophy worth knowing onto two sheets of note paper...