One for love

This article, titled All I Know About Gertrude Stein, is lifted from Granta 115, with thanks to Daniel Ong who sent it in.


Living with you would be the ultimate romance. I am a romantic and that is my defence against the love-commodity. I can’t buy love but I don’t want to rent it either. I would like to find a way to make the days with you be ours. I would like to bring my bag and unpack it.

You say we will fail, get frustrated, fall out, fight. All the F-words.

But there is another one: forgive.


In 1946 Gertrude Stein was suddenly admitted to the American Hospital at Neuilly. She had stomach cancer.

Only a few months earlier they had come back to Paris, in 1945 – the war over at last – to find the seal of the Gestapo on their apartment. Their silver and linen had been taken and the pictures were packed up ready to be removed to German art collections – that’s what happened if you were a Jew.

Alice had been so upset, but Gertrude wanted to get her portrait by Picasso hung over the fireplace again, sit down in their two armchairs either side of the fire, and have some tea.

‘The apartment is here. You are here. I am here,’ she said.

At the hospital the doctor came into the room. They administered the anaesthetic. Gertrude had been advised against an operation but she did not believe in death – at least not for her. She did not believe in the afterlife either. There was no there there. Everything was here. Gertrude Stein was present tense.

She held Alice’s hand. She said to Alice, What is the answer? But Alice was crying and only shook her head. Gertrude laughed her big rich laugh. ‘Then what is the question?’

The trolley bearing Gertrude was wheeled away. Alice walked beside her lover as though she were walking beside her whole life. Gertrude never came back.

The question is: How do we love?

It is a personal question each to each, intense, private, frightening, necessary. It is a world question too, angry, refusing, demanding, difficult.

Love is not sentimental. Love is not second best.

Women will have to take up arms for love.

Take me in your arms. This is the Here that we have.