Gertrude Stein Has Arrived by Roy Morris Jr

Author:Roy Morris Jr. [Morris, Roy Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781421431536
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

THEIR FIRST VISIT WENT SO WELL THAT GERTRUDE AND ALICE returned to Chicago for a two-week stay on November 24. Once again Bobsy Goodspeed was their hostess, putting them up for four days at her Lincoln Park townhouse before they checked into the landmark Drake Hotel facing Lake Michigan. The Drake, at the time, was one of Chicago’s two leading hotels (the Palmer House was the other). Renowned for its daily afternoon tea in the all-white Palm Court, the Drake was also home to the city’s chief mobster, Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, who had succeeded his boss Al Capone after Capone’s conviction for tax evasion three years earlier. It is unlikely that Gertrude crossed paths with Nitti; they both had crowded social schedules.

Bobsy hosted several tea parties of her own for Gertrude and Alice, including one at which they were delighted to reunite with the former Hadley Hemingway. Hadley had married local architect Paul Scott Mowrer a few months earlier, and if she bore any resentment toward Gertrude for the rough treatment accorded to her first husband in the Autobiography, she was too polite to say so. Hadley, as always, was effortlessly nice to everyone. As for the complaints of other alleged victims of the book in the current issue of transition magazine, Gertrude brushed them off in the press as “babyish” and “infantish.” Her comparison of Amelie Matisse to a horse was meant as a compliment, Gertrude maintained. “I’m crazy about horses,” she said. “You know there are many beautiful horses.” It was not, perhaps, her finest moment. Fanny Butcher loyally put the best construction on the controversy by noting that it had served to increase the public’s interest in the Autobiography. “They do this sort of getting worked up over literature so well in Paris,” she claimed. Gertrude appreciated the gesture. When she left Chicago, she gave Butcher a copy of Four Saints in Three Acts, inscribed a bit naughtily to “the best of the famous fans and . . . the very best of Fannies.”5

Gertrude soon found herself embroiled in another quarrel. The setting was the President’s House on the University of Chicago campus, where she and Alice were the guests of honor at a dinner hosted for them on November 25 by Robert M. Hutchins. Known variously as “the Boy President” and “the most dangerous man in American education,” Hutchins propounded a new approach to college education, deemphasizing vocational training and specialization in favor of having students learn how to think for themselves by studying the great thinkers of the past. To that end he brought in writer-philosopher Mortimer Adler from New York City to help him develop a “Great Books” program at the university. Hutchins and Adler were winding up a class that evening, and in her husband’s absence Maude Hutchins presided as hostess. Ordinarily, this would not have been a problem, but Gertrude had apparently tired of the nonstop round of dinners, cocktail parties, and opera performances that Bobsy Goodspeed had orchestrated for them in the past three days.

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