transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Great Women Artists podcast. I'm very excited to bring you today's episode, but just before we get to our sponsor, I'm delighted to say that my new book, The Story of Art Without Men, An Illustrated Guide to Amazing Women Artists for Younger Readers, or anyone to be honest, is out now. You can buy it from your local bookshop or wherever you get your books. And I'm thrilled to say that this series is supported by The Levett Collection, a vast and varied art collection, and which in the last eight years has become entirely focused on works by women artists. You can find much of this made up of impressionists, surrealists, abstract expressionists, contemporary artists, and more, at FAM in Moujane in France, the first museum in the world outside of the USA to have a permanent collection dedicated to major female artists. It's spearheaded by Christian Levett, who has published three research books in this area. Located in the heart of the historic village of Moujane-Nican in the south of France, FAM features a stunning collection of nearly 100 works by 90 internationally acclaimed and emerging female artists. The impressive exhibition of paintings, sculptures, and photographs from the Levett collection highlights the creative brilliance of women who have played pivotal roles in shaping some of the major artistic movements from impressionism to contemporary art. It's only 30 minutes away from Nice Airport, and FAM, which stands for Female Artists of the Moujane Museum, is open every day. And for further information and bookings, please visit www.famfam.com. I hope you enjoy this episode. Hello everyone and welcome to the Great Women Artists podcast with me, Katy Hessel. Some of you might know me from the Great Women Artists and Instagram account, which I set up in October 2015, which celebrates female artists on a daily basis ranging from young graduates to old masters. Well, in a similar fashion to the Instagram, this podcast is all about celebrating female artists from a variety of backgrounds and histories. And I am so excited to be interviewing artists on their career or artists, writers, curators or general art lovers on the women artist who means most of them. What I want this podcast to do is celebrate female artists in all different capacities, so you, the listener, can gain a look into the greatest female artists working now or from art history. I am so excited to say that my guest on The Great Women Artists podcast is the esteemed writer, Deborah Levy, the author of several novels, including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside the critically acclaimed Living Autobiography trilogy, some of my favourite books of all time, Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. Levy is one of the most recognizable and influential writers today. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and the Booker Prize. She has also written for the Royal Shakespeare Company and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. But the reason why we are speaking with Levy today is because she is about to publish a new novel, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, that follows a narrator who has traveled to Paris to find out more about the avant-garde pioneer, writer and patron. Set against the backdrop of present-day Paris, but peering into a world a hundred years ago, it explores life now versus a century ago. Women, friendship, a lost cat, ex-patriots in France versus America, and ultimately the life of Stein who, like Levy, who also partly resides in Paris, is a trailblazing experimenter in art and literature and creator of worlds. And I can't wait to find out more. Deborah Levy, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Speaker 2:
[03:50] Hi, Katy.

Speaker 1:
[03:52] Congratulations on your new book. I loved it for many reasons, but also for its ability to capture a portrait, albeit through a lens of a fictional narrator, of a woman who bolted through the 19th to the 20th century and paved the way for modernism as we know it today, as a gateway for women, freedom, liberation, gay rights, avant-gardism, experimentalism, and who despite being such a towering figure today, who lives on in modern art and literature, was only really recognised for her writing towards the end of her life, with her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. So I want to start by asking you what attracts you to Gertrude Stein as a figure?

Speaker 2:
[04:29] She's an avant-garde sister and she made something entirely new. So she wanted to kill the 19th century. She was born in 1874. She was never going to fit into any Victorian idea of femininity and she didn't want to. So the first thing she had to lose was her corset. And shame in a way. Because she was large, she was Jewish, she was queer. What was going to happen to Stein? So how did she put herself together? How did she, age 29, this was my interest, when she arrives in Paris, she's just flunked her medical exam. She had an eight year science training and she bailed out of her medical exams, really in the last year. And she arrives in Paris to join her brother Leo Stein. She's depressed, she takes off the tight clothes she wore as a medical student. And she starts to wear these sort of corduroy monkish robes and the sandals that Isidore Duncan's brother was making, these sort of white Greek sandals. I love this image of her. Her hair is long and curly and it's piled up on top of her head. Annist Hemingway described her as having immigrant hair. So one of the questions in this book is what do words mean? And that's actually Gertrude Stein's project to what do words mean.

Speaker 1:
[06:23] And when did that interest begin and what sparked it?

Speaker 2:
[06:29] I'd always been aware of Gertrude Stein. I'm not a total fan of all her writing. I'm not a Stein scholar. I don't wish to do endless close readings of a thousand pages of her novel, The Making of Americans. But, you know, from my 20s, I was aware of her as a figure because if you are a female writer, there were such kind of despairing role models. They all committed suicide. It was Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, who is my true love, literary love. But there was Gertrude Stein and she lived a life guided by pleasure. Pleasure was her guiding principle and actually that's quite subversive, I think. A female artist, you know, we're all supposed to suffer and endure and all the rest of it. But she really enjoyed life and she was encouraging and she was so singular. The way that she refused commas, she said they were servile. Question mark, she said it was obvious when something was a question. She wanted to write in the present tense, very influenced by William James, her tutor at Radcliffe College. And it's not quite streams of consciousness, but this repetition and patterning that she began in her writing hadn't been done before. So she's a pioneer.

Speaker 1:
[08:04] And why did you want to write a novel about her as opposed to a biography? In a way, it speaks to the kind of experimentalism of her own work as well. But reading a book, there's a slight film between the reader and Stein. I have to get through you. I have to get through the narrator. And there is Stein.

Speaker 2:
[08:21] Yes, you do. Because one, I didn't really want to write a fiction on Stein. You know, I don't actually believe in genre anymore anyway. I think that's just for marketing and for bookshops. Writing is writing. But what happened was that when I started to read all the biographies, of which there are many, and began to write this, I was never commissioned to write a biography. I was going to write about her relationship with William James, who was the founder of the psychology department at Radcliffe College, which is now Harvard. I realized there wasn't very much to do there, actually. And at the end of the day, I read back the writing. I was quite bored. I thought, I'm just repeating everything I have read on Stein. What's the point? What's the point of that? And I was really stuck. And I thought, what am I going to do? So I was living in Paris. It was 2024. I went for a walk. I live quite near Notre Dame. So I crossed the Seine in the rain, had a coffee. What am I going to do? And it occurred to me that both Stein and myself were strangers in Paris. We had come from elsewhere. And that I could maybe bring in contemporary Paris. So it wasn't some sort of nostalgic view of Stein going back to 1903 to 1946. Why not try and do some parallel of a female narrator who's quite a lot like myself, but not myself, actually in the city. Now, that seemed interesting. And then I was also watching quite a few Eric Rohmer movies. And what I really liked about those films is the way women talk endlessly in those films about everything. And I thought, what if a cat goes missing and three women walk through Paris searching for it? So something is lost that has to be found. And they talk about everything. Love, art, loss, aging, relationships, cooking. And what if I had six eyes on Stein? Not just my own, so ever in my book. She's even more enthusiastic about Stein than the narrator is supposed to be writing this essay on Stein. And Fanny, Stein's repetition drives her insane. She says that, you know, there are plenty of French writers who know how to use a full stop under question mark. So I wanted this parallel between the contemporary and the past.

Speaker 1:
[11:27] I think what's so interesting about Gertrude Stein, especially my route to her, which you talk about in the book, is the Picasso portrait. I mean, there's countless images of her taken beneath it. And she would always place herself in a chair in front of it. And as you quote her in the book, she says, for me, she wrote in 1938, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me, which is always I for me. I mean, the painting became central to her identity, so in a way, was someone else's interpretation of her. Can you talk about that painting and seeing oneself through the eyes of someone else and accepting an image of yourself through the eyes of someone else?

Speaker 2:
[12:07] Absolutely. I mean, interestingly, there is now a portrait of me in the National Portrait Gallery. And that is painted by Paul Heber-Percy. And it's very interesting to look at that painting, because it's not at all representational. But it feels very close to me. So I understand how Gertrude felt about that painting. She sat for Picasso about 80 times. She's very regal in that painting. She's in those brown velvet robes. She's a thinking subject in that portrait. And that's because she was thinking all the time. When she was sitting for that portrait, she was writing Three Lives, one of her early books of connecting short stories. And there was Picasso, her new friend. They're young, you have to remember this. They're really young in Paris. They're strangers in Paris. And his studio, I think there was one toilet for many artists. So she would have had to hoik up her robes. And I can imagine Gertrude sort of preparing for this whole thing. And when he could not paint her face and went off to Spain and then came back, and without her being there, painted this mask-like face, I think that was super clever because she is very masked. Gertrude Stein is quite a masked kind of personage to write about. We don't really know very much. We think we know everything about Gertrude Stein, but we don't. So I think that he got something of how inaccessible she is in a way. And she loved it because it wasn't at all revealing in any sense at all. It was masked. And why shouldn't she love that? You know, she's more concealed than revealed in that portrait. And I like that. I like that angle. I can see why she would go for it. She's not a machine for suffering. She's not a doormat. And she's not a goddess. She's a thinking subject. She's a machine for eating honeydew melons, which was her favourite fruit in that portrait.

Speaker 1:
[14:44] But I think it's also so interesting because in a way, you talk about in the book, like her not wanting to be understood as well. What do you think attracted Gertrude Stein to this veil of modern art as well, that she was such a champion of? Do you think it was her way of being understood? Because there's a moment in the book where you write about Stein's history of being a medical student saying she will eventually stare at modern art instead and try to work out how it is put together. She had no idea how to put herself together.

Speaker 2:
[15:13] Well, composition was her subject, right? Because she was going to make work that we hadn't seen before, structured in a way that would move across the page in a way that was entirely new. I think that when she started to collect art with her brother, he knew much more about it than she did. But she began to understand what she had to lose to become modern. And I think she understood what those paintings had to lose to become modern. So in a way, what was at stake was what was going on in those paintings, the bold and daring. They were questioning representation, naturalism. They're not about certainty. They're about uncertainty. She was looking at their form and she was looking at most of all at their composition. And she was looking at herself. How do I walk out into Paris tomorrow? So she had a very close relationship with those paintings, very different from Leo. Matisse became a good friend. We know about Picasso. She was very inspired by Cezanne's painting of his wife. She felt that the 19th century, which was, we know, a long century, was beginning to segue into something new in the 20th century. I think it's very hard for us to understand now what it is to make something new.

Speaker 1:
[17:01] Why do you think that? Because in a way, we don't know what it is. She didn't know. I mean, she did not believe it was worth having a conversation if everything is understandable. And in a way, it's best to not understand what you're doing because you can only know what it is retrospectively.

Speaker 2:
[17:16] Oh, yeah. I mean, all of that. And she said, anything new and valuable will at first appear ugly to an audience. And then it becomes a classic.

Speaker 1:
[17:29] And do you feel any affiliation? You spoke about you and Gertrude Stein were both strangers in Paris. But this idea of writing in order to understand what's inside of yourself, you say after all, everybody that is everybody who writes is interested in living inside themselves. In order to tell what is inside themselves, that's why writers have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really.

Speaker 2:
[17:53] Yes, I think that's an excellent bit of writing. No, I have no affiliation with Gertrude Stein's writing. But I have a great admiration for her pioneering spirit, for her experiments. I love it that she came from science and psychology and cubism. And from those things, she put together her writing behavior, if you like.

Speaker 1:
[18:21] And I'd love to go back to Stein's early years. She was born in the US. She was born in Pennsylvania to German-Jewish immigrant parents. Tell us about her family. What sort of environment did she grow up in?

Speaker 2:
[18:34] Yeah, so she came from quite an affluent family, affluent middle-class family. Her parents were Jewish-German immigrants. Her father had arrived in America age 18 to start up a clothing business with his brother. So there were five children, I think. She was closest to Leo. She was the youngest and the cleverest, although Leo thought that might be him. So when she returned to America after writing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her name was up in Times Square. Gertrude Stein has landed or Gertrude Stein has arrived. So she was really one of the few avant-garde writers to have her name up in lights. The parents died. Her mother died when she was 13. Same with Virginia Woolf, actually. Her father, when she was 17, she found father's depressing and that life became quite pleasant after her father died. Which always made me laugh because it's so taboo to say that kind of thing. And she goes off to Radcliffe after staying with her aunts in Baltimore. She was very interested in her Jewish aunts and she'd ask them a lot about sexual intercourse. This made me laugh a lot. And you know, do you like it? And they told her that they didn't like it at all. And she would report back to Leo on this. I quite like that part of the brother-sister relationship. Then she's at Radcliffe and she's entranced by William James. I think he was charmed by her rollicking spirit and understood that she had tremendous bravado, but she was actually in mourning as well. Her parents had died quite recently. I think he saw through Gertrude Stein. My feeling, this is all conjecture, is that he had quite paternal feelings for Gertrude. And he admired her and he said, well, if you want to study women's nervous disorders, which is what she did want to study, because she had noticed on one of her walks in California, a man hitting a woman with an umbrella. She wanted to know why he behaved in that way. So that took her to psychology. And he said, well, you know, train as a medical doctor, that will be your route to becoming a psychologist. And she was rather flattered and dead.

Speaker 1:
[21:20] And from a really early age, she claimed to read all of Shakespeare by the age of 19 and was a huge a sort of a fish in the water with art and literature. Why move into the psychology space? And how did that psychological training actually probably influence her in art?

Speaker 2:
[21:34] How it influenced her, I think she always said she wanted to get to grips with what she called bottom character. I have no idea what these 19th century expressions mean. What does that mean? Why do people behave like in the way that they do? Does it mean that? She mostly learnt in psychology from William James about writing in the present tense, about what we would now call streams of consciousness, and letting a thought flow and another thought come in, and not necessarily finding a narrative connection between those two thoughts. So, I think she was just genuinely interested in science. She spent a lot of her life peering down at a microscope.

Speaker 1:
[22:30] And then went on to medical school as well.

Speaker 2:
[22:33] Absolutely. And there she did quite well in the beginning. It was incredibly misogynist. Female doctors were a new thing. It was pretty anti-Semitic too. She was often called a battle axe by one of her professors. And her story is, is that she was irrevocably bored. That she just couldn't bear it anymore. And she was sort of discouraged. There was one professor who'd make all these bawdy jokes about women giving birth. So her mother, who had birthed five children, must have been on her mind because she contested his tone. She found it offensive. And he said, well, if you don't like my seminars, you won't come back. She was discouraged basically. And when she'd failed four of the nine exams, she had to sit. Another professor encouraged her to reset, but she decided to scarper. So she was very nearly a doctor. She knew more about tuberculosis than she did about literature.

Speaker 1:
[23:39] It's kind of extraordinary. And I think especially this sort of scientific approach to art or literature, or also, you know, modern art and cubism being something that is physically fractured as well, a fractured body, and how do you piece it back together?

Speaker 2:
[23:52] Yeah. I don't think she ever wanted to piece it back together. But I think her avant-garde sensibility came from being the daughter of immigrants, being queer, the bold and daring art she was collecting with her brother and onwards, and the experiments with language that took up all her time, I mean, really preoccupied her. She would write at night. You have to remember, if you look at Tender Buttons, her book of prose and poetry, she was writing that, I think that was published in 1912. She was writing with gas lamp. You know, electricity hadn't been installed in her apartment yet. Sometimes, all the art that they had hung on the wall from the floor to the ceiling, some people would strike a match at certain times to take a look at it.

Speaker 1:
[25:00] Why do you think Paris has been this pull for so many artists and writers, especially at that turn of the 20th century?

Speaker 2:
[25:09] Yes, for myself, you can walk around very easily. Paris is a village, everybody says. It's easy to meet people. People are passing through. There's a pulse, there's a zip. There's a sort of, as you say, a long history of bold and daring work. Our concept of work and our art work.

Speaker 1:
[25:31] I'm interested in how she created these communities as well. I mean, you spoke about earlier, she is the ultimate avant-garde woman. In many ways, her family situation helped her, which also, as you say, parallels to the Stevens siblings, Virginia and Vanessa when they were younger. They could buy a house in Bloomsbury. They could create discussions because of that affluence and that freedom as well. There's something about, I can imagine, I don't know, but when you look at Virginia and Vanessa's life, they're sort of, because they didn't have parents and they had this new century, they almost didn't have a ceiling on it, didn't have a lid on it. It was almost like they could create that they could be the parents, that this freedom was theirs but also because they had that financial backing.

Speaker 2:
[26:12] Absolutely. I write a lot about Gertrude Stein's trust fund. So her brother Michael had made some very shrewd investments with their inheritance when their father died. It meant that she had a modest monthly income. She didn't have loads of money but she had enough to never have to work. So is that a good thing? Did it help? Virginia Woolf, we know her aunt left her some money and that meant that she had a monthly income. But it did give her freedom and maybe it also shackles you because it might have been good for her to work at being more understood in the early days. When I say understood, I don't mean that you erase complexity, mystery, enigma, but I mean, yeah, you could just do your automatic writing endlessly because you have a check coming in at the end of the month. It might have been good for her to actually go there, there.

Speaker 1:
[27:27] I think it's interesting. It gives you so much freedom, but then also restricts you in so many ways because sometimes when you have too much time, you don't know how to fill it. And actually you have freedom in small chunks of time, whether you're caring for someone or you have to have a job or making art is sometimes easier when you have to fit it around other things.

Speaker 2:
[27:46] I think it's good to need to be paid for your art. I think it's good for the artist. Not that I would ever turn down the opportunity to have a monthly trust fund, believe me. But actually I think it's a good thing to want to be paid, to need to be paid for the art that you make. But she did really good things with her money. She collected this incredible art for a start. She always said to Hemingway, you can choose between clothes and art and I choose art. They lived quite frugally. They weren't kind of champagne people, you know. They lived really well. They grew vegetables in their country house. Alice became an immensely talented gardener. Gertrude Stein did absolutely nothing. She sat on a recliner with her white poodle by her knees and her little dog Pepe tucked behind her neck and kind of meditated. And then when she did need money, she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. And that became her bestselling book and changed her life.

Speaker 1:
[29:03] And she met Alice B. Toklas in 1907 when she was 33, which is actually incredibly young. And they soon started a relationship. And at the time she was very close with her brother Leo. But this sort of caused a little fracture in their relationship. But at the same time, coming back to that idea of if you have that stipend and you have that freedom or whatever, you can also live how you want. And in Gertrude Stein's situation, she was almost the kind of, at a time when queer relationships weren't as acceptable as they are now, obviously. She could take on a role that women couldn't before.

Speaker 2:
[29:38] Well, I think living with Leo had given her a sort of disguised respectability, right? You have to remember when she arrived in Paris, Oscar Wilde had died, I think, three years before she arrived, in solitude and broken in this hotel in Paris. She would have known that. So, she meets Alice and they fall in love. And Alice and Gertrude decide that they are going to kind of marry unofficially. And Alice moves in to the apartment. And you can understand Leo finding this a bit of a pain. But that's not really the important thing. What's important from her point of view is that she is writing every night. This is the thing about Gertrude Stein. She's not some sort of cartoonish figure chuckling away with Alice sort of cooking her soufflés. She's working. She's thinking. She's writing all the time. And so there's Leo looking at his baby sister up all night doing that. He's completely stuck. He's supposed to be the intellectual. He basically thinks he's intelligent and she's basically stupid. And Alice really changed things for Gertrude because she had so many rejections for her work. She felt so misunderstood and Alice loved her work. Who was Alice's favorite writer? It was Gertrude Stein. And she felt that there was someone there. Gertrude felt that there was someone listening who really understood it. And that changed everything. And loving changes everything, as we know. So that they could begin to put another sort of life together after Leo left. And they would begin to make a stable, loving, calm home, which a wild writer like Gertrude Stein would really need. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[31:55] You spoke a bit about earlier, but this idea of the ejection of the 19th century and bolting through, through to the 20th and this amazing sense that sometimes it takes the power of art to eject us out of an old century and input us into something new. I mean, what is the power of art to create a gateway for the new?

Speaker 2:
[32:15] Well, that's a huge question. But for Gertrude Stein, who really cleared the way for the American Avant-Garde in the 1950s, so that would be John Cage, it would be Merce Cunningham, it would be the living theater, Frank O'Hara. She was on to a repetitive language. She was on to a patterning with language that she had learned from the paintings that she collected and admired. And so I think she's the only writer I can think about, who was entirely influenced actually by art. So when she was writing her, what she called her word portraits or her still lives, she's trying to write like a Cubist painter. What a stupid idea. Why would you do that when you have Cubist paintings? But that's what she was going to do. And I respect her for it. The other thing, a real great passage of writing is her monogram on Picasso, where she describes going up in an airplane for the first time when she is touring America. And she looks down and she sees all the lines of Cubism mingling beneath the plane. She realizes that those artists saw something that was invisible, they made visible, something that was there already. And that's what she says makes somebody modern, you see it first.

Speaker 1:
[33:56] Yeah, that's extraordinary. Art is obviously so part of your creative process as well. I mean, you've written extensively on Francesca Woodman or Louise Bourgeois and Rodenstein. I'm looking at a Francesca Woodman photograph there. I know she's hugely influential for you. How do images influence you?

Speaker 2:
[34:14] It's hard to say. There's no way I'd want to write like a Cubist painting.

Speaker 1:
[34:19] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[34:20] But maybe there is a way that I'd quite like to write like a Francesca Woodman image. Sort of exploring absence and presence and disappearing, and a kind of attitude, and a playfulness, and a mood, and the lighting of her photographs. I find that really inspiring. It's like, why is she there but not there? That's something that I do explore in my fiction. As for Louise Bourgeois, what I learned from Bourgeois is, when she says something like, I make art because my emotions are bigger than I am, that's a very uncool thing to say. And I love how uncool it is. And it's true. Why else would you make art? You make art because your emotions are bigger than you are. And she nailed it. So she's incredibly inspiring to me, yes.

Speaker 1:
[35:19] I said at the beginning when I think of Stein, I think of the Picasso portrait. And so often we see her almost as a character or a subject, even, dare I say it, more so than the physicality of her writing in lots of ways. I'm interested in that. Do you think that is a sort of product of society? Do you think it's a product of sexism? Why is it with women sometimes they become almost mythical characters rather than known for the sort of nuts and bolts of their work?

Speaker 2:
[35:46] That's such a good question. I wonder. I mean, I think she just did have a very interesting life. It has to be said. And she didn't have the kind of life that straight heterosexual women of her generation created. You know, she didn't have children. She didn't need to marry to be supported by a man because she had a trust fund. And then she also has, I think she really worked very hard at having a kind of brute superiority. But at the same time, this is very important to me. I think that my book gives Gertrude Stein a body because she's so disembodied in the way that she is written. It's almost as if she's not allowed to have a body. So I return the body to Gertrude Stein.

Speaker 1:
[36:50] Thank you so much, Deborah, for this wonderful interview. I've got one more question, which is, as this is The Great Women Artists podcast, we always ask our guests if you could ask or say something to Gertrude Stein, what would it be?

Speaker 2:
[37:01] My goodness. I would ask Gertrude Stein about her lingerie. I'd say, what material do you like to feel next to your skin? Is it silk? Is it cotton? So I'm being provocative because there is such a kind of, I don't know, impulse to never go there with Gertrude Stein. She was all mind and all appetite, apparently, but I would actually ask her about her lingerie drawer. What does she like to feel next to her skin?

Speaker 1:
[37:40] Wonderful. Deborah Levy, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of The Great Women Artists podcast with the brilliant Deborah Levy on the trailblazer who was Gertrude Stein. Do not miss Levy's new book, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, which is out now and available at all good bookstores. This episode was edited by the brilliant Mikaela Carmichael. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Great Women Artists Podcast with me, Katy Hessel.