Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein appears in Ernest Hemingway’s recollections as both a formative literary presence and a demanding interpreter of the people around her. She offered the young writer hospitality and close attention to his stories, helped shape the language through which his generation was understood, and became the subject of a friendship that Hemingway describes as ending strangely. Her influence is presented not as a single lesson but as a sequence of encounters: a welcoming studio, a difficult judgment about what could be published, instruction that challenged his assumptions, and practical work on her own book.

Identity and Setting

Stein receives Hemingway and his wife in her studio at 27 rue de Fleurus, where she lives with a companion. The apartment contains a large collection of paintings and has a fireplace; Stein and her companion offer their visitors food, tea, and fruit-based liqueurs. The room’s combination of art, warmth, and hospitality makes their first visits feel less formal than a meeting with an established writer might have done. Hemingway recalls that Stein and her companion treated the young married couple as promising but inexperienced, and that the visitors enjoyed their company even when the companion’s manner made them uneasy.

Stein is described as broad-built rather than tall, with striking eyes and a strong face. Hemingway’s account gives particular attention to how she speaks and occupies a room: she talks continually, initially about people and places, and holds the visitors’ attention. This portrait is filtered through the narrator’s memory rather than offered as an external biography. Stein emerges through what she does in conversation and as a host, as much as through physical description.

An Early Reader and Literary Critic

When Stein visits the Hemingways’ small flat, she sits on the bed, which is placed on the floor, and asks to see Hemingway’s stories. She approves of most of them but objects to “Up in Michigan,” describing it as inaccrochable: in her analogy, it is like a painting that cannot be hung in an exhibition and therefore cannot be sold. Her judgment distinguishes a work’s quality from its ability to find a public setting. The story may be good, yet its subject or treatment makes it difficult for readers and publishers to accommodate.

Hemingway resists the implication that he should avoid ordinary words merely because they are socially uncomfortable. He argues that a story must use the words people would actually use when those are the words needed to make it true. Their exchange establishes an important difference in emphasis: Stein identifies the practical barriers between a work and its audience, while Hemingway insists on the obligations of truthful language. The encounter does not simply present her as a censor or him as a defiant pupil; it shows the young writer testing his artistic principles against the judgment of someone whose approval matters to him.

Instruction and Intellectual Friction

In a later recollection of an afternoon at Stein’s studio, Hemingway says that they already liked one another and that he had learned to take seriously what he did not understand. Stein considers him insufficiently educated about sexuality, while he acknowledges that he brings prejudices shaped by earlier experience. He tries to explain the assumptions he acquired among men when young; Stein challenges the framework from which he is speaking. The passage records a disagreement in outlook without resolving it into a simple conversion. Its importance is that Stein acts as an interlocutor who forces Hemingway to examine the limits and origins of his own ideas.

Their conversations also sit within a broader literary relationship. Hemingway describes himself as learning from Stein even when he cannot yet explain what he is learning. Elsewhere, he recounts visiting the Musée du Luxembourg to study Cézanne and realizing that the aim of writing simple, true sentences did not by itself give stories the full dimensions he wanted. Stein’s studio belongs to this period of artistic education, but the account does not claim that she supplied a complete theory or that Hemingway could then articulate her influence. Instead, her importance lies partly in the questions and judgments that keep his understanding unsettled.

Work, Friendship, and Practical Support

The relationship includes substantial help with Stein’s own writing. She dislikes the labor of revision and the obligation to make her work intelligible, yet she wants publication and official acceptance for The Making of Americans. Hemingway gets Ford Madox Ford to serialize the long book in The Transatlantic Review. He also types the manuscript and reads the proofs for Stein, a task he says brought him into close contact with a work that gave her little happiness. He admires its brilliant stretches but judges that it later becomes repetitious and overlong. His account therefore combines loyalty in practical matters with an unvarnished assessment of the book.

Stein, in turn, grants Hemingway unusual access to her home. When he explains that he has not visited because he does not know whether she is there, she tells him he may come in at any time and make himself at home until she returns. He sometimes does so, accepts a drink from the maidservant, looks at the pictures, and leaves a message if Stein does not appear. The arrangement conveys trust through ordinary habits rather than formal declarations. Hemingway says that their friendship had become very close, even as he reflects more generally on the uncertain future of friendships between men and ambitious women writers.

The Lost Generation and the Strange Ending

While Stein and Hemingway are still friends, she applies the description of a lost generation to young people who served in the war. The phrase enters their conversation through an incident involving trouble with Stein’s Model T Ford: a young garage worker, a veteran of the final year of the war, is reprimanded after failing to repair it properly, and the garage owner’s criticism prompts Stein to extend the label to the postwar youth as a whole. Hemingway records her declaration and his brief response, preserving both the everyday origin of the phrase and the speed with which she turns one worker’s conduct into a judgment about a generation.

The recollection later announces a strange ending to Stein and Hemingway’s friendship, but the available passage does not complete the account of how that separation unfolds. At the point described, Stein and her companion are preparing to drive south, and Stein has asked Hemingway to call and say goodbye. She has also invited him and his wife to visit, although they have other plans and places they want to go. Hemingway presents the missed visit as part of learning the unspoken conventions of not visiting people, not as a full explanation of the rupture. Stein’s narrative role thus remains deliberately double: she is a mentor and benefactor whose home and judgment help form Hemingway, but also a figure whose friendship eventually acquires an ending the excerpt leaves unresolved.