Literary Hub Goes on Tour With Gertrude Stein

Read a selection from Roy Morris Jr.'s book, Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend (John Hopkins University Press, 2019), at Literary Hub. Morris Jr.'s new volume narrates Stein and Toklas's 1934 tour across the United States following decades of self-imposed exile in France. "Once on board the ship, Gertrude Stein and Alice were treated like the transatlantic celebrities they had become," Morris Jr. begins. More: 

The uneventful crossing took a week. The 641-foot Champlain, built by the French line Chantiers et Ateliers de Saint-Nazaire, was one of three new luxury liners plying the Atlantic that autumn; the others were the Colombie and the Lafayette. Gertrude and Alice mingled freely with other passengers, including the widow of a French general killed at Touraine when they were there, and about whose accidental death Gertrude and Alice maintained a discreet silence.

They also met a woman who read their horoscopes and told Gertrude, unsurprisingly, that her visit to America “would be of the greatest interest to her.” “Everybody talked to us and we talked to everybody,” Gertrude said. They met a prosperous-looking couple from Newark, New Jersey, Dr. and Mrs. Robert Wood, which would quickly prove useful after their arrival in America. And they renewed their acquaintance with Abbé Ernest Dimnet, the best-selling author of The Art of Thinking, a sort of self-help book for intellectuals that included one quote, in particular, that might have pertained to Gertrude: “Genius is not genius all the time, although it is superior all the time.”

The abbé made something of a spectacle of himself during the ship’s mandatory lifeboat drills, complaining loudly that no one was actually getting into the boats. “Tell the captain,” Gertrude said. He went off to do just that...

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