User:DeRossitt/Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein

Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein is a 1975 book by Janet Hobhouse.

Overview
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Reception
Richard Bridgman in American Literature: The present work, based as thoroughly as it is on secondary sources, cannot join the necessary sequence of the Sprigge, Brinnin, and Mellow biographies.

Miss Hobhouse has produced an attractive, extensively illustrated synthesis that traces the various traumas, shifts, and accommodations of the Stein career afresh.

As a brief, intelligent introduction to Stein ... this will serve.

Bruce Wolmer interviewed Janet Hobhouse in BOMB:

BW: Your first book was a biography of Gertrude Stein, and I think that one sees a certain muted Stein influence in the rhythms of your prose. It never appears to me self-consciously stylized and yet there is a fineness of ear. Has there been such an influence?

JH: The thing about Gertrude Stein is that she writes a lot of things, but she also writes these arias. And they are arias of the self, sitting alone in a room speaking to itself. It's a kind of access of solitude, to privacy, that enables you to sing in your own voice. The thing that most influenced me about Gertrude Stein was her notion that one has to do nothing but be one's self, one's conscious self. One did not have to please because one couldn't please. Because for most of her life she was completely ignored and isolated. It gives you a kind of recklessness and a kind of courage to develop your own voice. I've been called Jamesian and I think in a sense she was Jamesian. Actually, in two senses: she was taught by William James. I think that the huge landscape of America, and the fact that you cannot run out of space, the urge to fill the void with the self, I think that is American and Jamesian. It is also very Gertrude Stein. And when you're sitting in front of your blank piece of paper, if you can take it, it can also be yours.

BW: That's the best side of being American - having that freedom. Even if those horizons become cluttered with K-Marts and TV. Is the reason you find the enclosed personality England provides insufficient precisely this fact that Americans have, the dreck notwithstanding, an extraordinary freedom?

JH: Yes. In this big American space, as Gertrude Stein might say, you can put what you want. You can either dump images of K-Mart, highway culture, whatever it is, or you can say, "But that doesn't really make my life." And then you can find that your life is made outside of the shopping mall in your chair, in the silence of your own head, in your memories, in your desires and you find that voice. Now that's the opportunity, to fill the space with the voice. And the voice is not disembodied from the life. It has to be connected to the life and to the moral pressures, if you want to call them that, of the life. But the argument with this kind of fiction that is called K-Mart, is that this perfectly beautiful landscape is being littered with junk. And it doesn't have to be littered with junk. It can be littered with truth.

BW: I still hear in what you're saying, though, an echo of the Bloomsbury ideal of a life lived almost wholly in personal terms - for love, personal ethics, the appreciation of art and ideas.

JH: I think that the notion of Bloomsbury is hugely attractive in the concept and in the fact rather revolting. That the sins of Bloomsbury are as glaring as those of any other type of Utopian notion. Bloomsbury existed at a very significant remove from the rest of England. It was an elite. It was disdainful. I'm thinking in particular of Virginia Woolf. It was disdainful of the larger world which it inhabited. It was a "little us" program. I think in that respect I am not attracted by Bloomsbury. The belief in friendship as the basis for (41) I suppose we call the affective life I think was no bad thing. In a way, Dancing in the Dark is about that, it's about a version of Bloomsbury that existed at a historical moment in New York in terms of the gay community. In terms of my life, I have my closest and most sustaining relationships with my friends and I think that that is something that happens to people in their mid to late 30s, if they're lucky. So that aspect, sure. The belief in love depends who you're talking to about Bloomsbury. If you're talking about Lytton Strachey and his high-school crushes on Duncan Grant and Maynard Keynes or Virginia's very troubled relationship with Leonard, then I don't think that this can be much of a model. As for Vanessa and Duncan, well, who knows what went on there. So I don't know about the erotic-love model of Bloomsbury. I imagine it's a little patchy. I might just add that the feminist movement in the 1970s reestablished friendship, single-gender friendship. Friendship as a great social good. And that has to be taken into account on the other side of these gay friendships. Personally, I like it mixed. And I am lucky in being able to be as intimate with my men friends as I am with my friends who are women.

Michael J. Hoffman in Modern Fiction Studies: In addition, Hobhouse makes factual errors a more careful biographer would have avoidéd. She confuses the fictional name of Mabel Neathe in Q.E.D. with her real-life model, Mabel Haynes. She too frequently accepts Stein's version of events as given in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a book as inaccurate as it is fascinating. For instance, she repeats without question Stein's claim that she sat ninety times for her portrait by Picasso, a claim that Mellow much reduces. She accepts Stein's statement that she "never altered a single word of what she wrote," which she could not have done had she looked at Stein's manuscripts at Yale's Beinecke Library or, for that matter, read Richard Bridgman's Gertrude Stein in Pieces more carefully. At best, this book is a pleasant introduction to Stein's life, if read with caution.

Elizabeth Hardwick in The Threepenny Review

Elizabeth Wise: Other biographies focus on Stein as a celebrity, and readers, while quite entertained, might begin to wonder if the purpose of the biography is to explore the work of Stein or describe her relationships with other famous people. Janet Hobhouse’s Everybody Who Was Anybody and James Mellow’s Charmed Circle, the titles themselves emphasizing Stein’s circle of famous friends, achieve both tasks, but these chatty and accessible biographies do lack a depth of critical engagement with her work.