Gertrude Stein Has Arrived: The Homecoming of a Literary Legend, by Roy Morris Jr. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019

I tend to be interested in biographies of artists and writers of the early parts of the last century, so even though I’ve never managed to read one of her poems I requested this book. I may now attempt to read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (written by Stein, not her life partner Toklas, she of the infamous brownies), after finding out that it’s a lot more readable than her earlier works. The fact that she was a self-declared genius seems, well, scary, but people really did find her talks and advice brilliant and interesting.



Although both were from the Bay Area, Stein and Toklas left America and lived in France- which was more welcoming to lesbian couples- for most of their lives. Here she collected art, wrote, and held salons for writers and artists. Many came to her for advice about their art or writing. It was when Stein published The Autobiography that she suddenly became known in America, and was asked to come over for a speaking tour. For over six months the duo went all over the US, to 37 cities. They had tea with Eleanor Roosevelt, met Charlie Chaplain and Mary Pickford (who wasn’t impressed with her), had a ride-along in a police car with a homicide detective, met with the Raven Society in Edger Allen Poe’s old room, visited several Civil War battlefields, had their first airplane ride, had Oysters Rockefeller in New Orleans- suddenly everyone loved this couple. She gave both literary and social issue speeches. The title comes from the “Gertrude Stein Has Arrived” message that was put on the New York Times reader sign.



If you know nothing about Stein, this is a great little biography. They don’t leave France until halfway through the book, so we get a good picture of their lives pre-lecture tour. Then we find out the things that she and Toklas saw, and the things that they said, while in the US. Stein came away with new admiration for the country she had so long disdained, stating that she was in love with the US now. I found the book a very interesting and fairly quick read; it’s full of celebrities like Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and even Walter Cronkite interviewing her while in college! Five stars.

The Violet Hour: Great Writers at the End, by Katie Roiphe. The Dial Press, 2016

“The Violet Hour” examines five (six, actually, if you include the epilogue) writers and how they faced their impending deaths. The author not only examined biographies but source materials and when possible, interviewed friends and family members. Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak have their last years/months/days/hours examined. John Salter, in the epilogue, she actually interviews a while before he quite unexpectedly and suddenly dies- they talk of death and how to face it but of course he had no idea he was soon to die.

Susan Sontag, who had survived two bouts with cancer that were supposed to kill her seemed to think she could beat the third one, too. She tried everything, including a bone marrow transplant which was experimental in those days. She worked until the end, writing in her hospital bed.

Freud also worked until the end; he also, despite having extensive oral cancers, continued to smoke his cigars. To keep his head clear, he eschewed painkillers except for aspirin; when the pain finally becomes unbearable, he asked for terminal sedation. No in-between measures for him.

While all their deaths are different in both cause and course, and they didn’t all accept their dying to the same degree, they all worked right up until the end- although admittedly Dylan did as much drinking and having sex with people not his wife as he did working. These people all had the benefit of knowing that their work would live on after they died; they knew that they had not lived meaningless lives (not that you have to be an artist to have a meaningful life; it’s just that I know one of the questions dying people ask themselves is whether their lives have had meaning and if anyone will remember them). Did that make it easier for them to face death? Perhaps. Or did working keep their minds off their impending demises? It seems most likely that they just had so much more to say that they had to race and try and beat the clock.

It’s a very interesting book; I’ve read a number of books about the end of life but never one that focused on writers. I wonder if visual artists have the same irrepressible urge to create to the end as writers do, or if musicians do- although David Bowie’s recent death would seem to point to that. I have to think that this makes death a little easier. 

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Shakespeare’s Tremor and Orwell’s Cough: The Medical Lives of Famous Writers, by John J. Ross, M.D. St. Martin’s Press, 2012

The writer of this book, John J. Ross, is a doctor who put his medical knowledge to work to try and figure out what ailments plagued ten classic authors- and what killed them.

Everyone talks about their health, and authors are no different. Letters by and about them give lots of clues as to their medical state, and they, along with articles and biographies, have given Ross their symptoms. Modern medical training has given him the means to decipher them. Shakespeare’s hand tremor was probably from mercury poisoning, a treatment for venereal disease (and a lot of other things, right up to the 1950s) in the Bard’s day. Nathaniel Hawthorne had social phobia, and almost certainly died of a blood clot, which his advanced stomach cancer put him at high risk for.

The book is a bit like episodes of House (minus the massive bleeding scenes and the snark) set in the past. The author explains, in plain language, how the various diseases operate in the body and how he came to his conclusions. So it’s a bit of a disease primer, as well as a history of medical treatments, some of which are truly horrifying. I found it fascinating, both entertaining and educational.