Sunday, January 1, 2023

Get Into Dodge


I wrote, "If you sign up for my workshop, I'll carry your bags and help you pack and unpack them. You can decide where and when you want to stop, but I'll have some suggestions too."

You said your interest is in character, and after preliminary discussions it was decided that you would write portraits, not stories, and you happily accepted my loan of Gertrude Stein's Look At Me Now and Here I Am (1945) and George Bowering's Curious (1973) as examples.

At our next meeting you produced a copy of another Stein book -- The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) -- published in the same year the Nazi's came to power, which for Stein might well have been as good a time as any to publish an autobiography.

"Here," you said pointing to the page. "I want to write a portrait of her. My own portrait."

Gertrude Stein having written The Portrait of Mabel Dodge [1912], Mabel Dodge immediately wanted it printed. She had three hundred copies struck off and bound in Florentine paper. Constance Fletcher corrected the proofs and we were all awfully pleased. Mabel Dodge immediately conceived the idea that Gertrude Stein should be invited from one country house to another and do portraits and then end up doing portraits of millionaires which would be a very exciting and lucrative career. Gertrude Stein laughed. A little later we went back to Paris. (132)

I asked if you had heard of Rachel Cusk's book Second Place (2021), which is inspired by Mabel Dodge's 1932 account of hosting D. H. Lawrence in Taos, and you surprised me when you said you'd read it and knew of its source.

"So you want to do what Stein's already done?" I asked, rhetorically.

"Ah, but Stein's is a fiction," you said; "I'm only interested in the truth."

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