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##### July 28, 1946 OBITUARY ## Gertrude Stein Dies In France, 72 ##### By Wireless to THE NEW YORK TIMES PARIS, July 27--Gertrude Stein, famed woman writer and one of the most controversial figures of American letters, died at 6:30 o' clock tonight (Paris time) at the American Hospital in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris. Her age was 72. She had been suffering from cancer and had been in the hospital about a week. PARIS, July 27 (U.P.)--Death came to Miss Stein one hour after she had entered a coma. Doctors worked for an hour to revive her. At the bedside were Miss Alice B. Toklas, Miss Stein's nephew and niece and a physician identified only as Colonel Rogers. The body was removed to the hospital's chapel. Funeral arrangements will be delayed until after the writer's relatives in the United States have been notified. [Writers said recently that Miss Stein had planned to return to the United States in the autumn, according to The Associated Press.] Miss Stein's nurse declared that the author had been seriously ill for a considerable time, suffering from a run-down condition. The first indication that she had taken a turn for the worse, the nurse added, was a telephone call from the hospital this afternoon saying that her condition had become suddenly grave. Emphasized Sound in Language Although Gertrude Stein could and did write intelligibly at times, her distinction rested on her use of words apart from their conventional meaning. Her emphasis on sound rather than sense is illustrated by her oft-quoted "A rose is a rose is a rose." Devotees of her cult professed to find her restoring a pristine freshness and rhythm to language. Medical authorities compared her effusions to the rantings of the insane. The Hearst press inquired, "Is Gertrude Stein not Gertrude Stein but somebody else living and talking in the same body?" Sinclair Lewis concluded she was conducting a racket. Born Feb. 3, 1874, in Allegheny, Pa., the daughter of Daniel Stein, who was vice president of a street railway, and Amelia Keyser Stein, she spent her infancy in Vienna and Paris, and her childhood in Oakland and San Francisco. She was, in her own words, "an omnivorous reader, going through whole libraries, reading everything.? Pupil of William James From 1893 to 1897 she was a student at Radcliffe College, where "like almost everyone else I wanted to be a writer but nobody encouraged me much." Miss Stein was, however, a favorite pupil of William James and specialized in psychology. When she sat down to write her final examination for him, she was tired, having been to the opera the night before. "Dear Professor James," she wrote on her paper, "I am so sorry but I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today." William James replied by postcard: "Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself." He gave her the highest mark in the course. During this period she published in a psychological journal a paper recording her experiments in spontaneous automatic writing--the method, according to some critics, by which her books were produced. She then studied medicine four years at Johns Hopkins University, specializing in brain anatomy, but took no degrees, explaining that she was interested only in her studies and that she was bored by tests. After a year in London studying Elizabethan prose, she removed in 1903 to Paris with Alice B. Toklas, a San Francisco friend, who was to be her lifelong secretary-companion. Knew Famous Artists On her arrival in Paris, she met the artists, Picasso, Matisse and Bracque. Possessed of an independent income, she became a patron of these men, was influenced by them and handed along that influence to younger artists and writers, among them Ernest Hemingway and the late Sherwood Anderson. Her hobby was collecting the works of painters before they were famous. She claimed to have discovered Picasso, Juan Gris, Matisse and Bracque and introduced them to the French and American public. Her shrewd connoisseurship is indicated by the fact that her collection of paintings was worth more than ten times what she paid for it. Her first book, "Three Lives," 1909, written in completely intelligible style, contained realistic tender portraits of two servant girls and a more difficult study of the unhappy love affair of a Negress. Carl Van Vechten, the critic, classed it with the greatest books of the age in his introduction to the Modern Library edition, which was a best seller. Also written with more or less lucidity were her two biographies of herself, entitled, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" and "Everybody's Autobiography," containing chitchat about Paris artists and American writers in Paris, with discourses on celebrities, art, literature, history and life in general and the genius of Gertrude Stein in particular. During the first World War, Miss Stein drove a Ford down the lines disturbing supplies to soldiers and visiting hospitals. Her publications included "Making of Americans," 1926, and "Prayers and Portraits," 1934, the latter described as "unadulterated "Steinese" and compared by John Chamberlain in The New York Times to "the Chinese water torture; it never stops and it is always the same." Another critic once remarked that Miss Stein "elected to write in a manner which much of the time makes her concrete meaning inaccessible to the reader. . . . She pushed abstraction to its farthest limits." Clifton Fadiman dismissed Miss Stein as "the Mamma of Dada." Wrote Opera Libretto Perhaps the peak of her publicity was reached in 1934 when she came here on a lecture tour, and her opera "Four Saints in Three Acts," with music by Virgil Thompson, containing the famed line "Pigeons on the grass alas," as significant as the rest of the libretto, was produced. As a lecturer, Miss Stein demonstrated her genius for self-press agentry by at once limiting her audiences to 500 because she "didn't wish to be stared at as a marvel." Her lectures went off well. Her audiences, if addled and bewildered by her pronouncements, were also entertained by this roughly dressed woman, with close-cropped hair that set off her strong features. Among her most recent works were "Paris, France," "a love letter to France," and "Wars I Have Seen," her experiences in occupied France until the arrival of the Americans. For this last book, her publisher, Bennett Cerf, had to abandon his amiable custom of remarking on the blurb of a Stein book that he had no idea what it was about. For in it she forgets herself and her genius in following life in a French village from day to day in defeat and after liberation. She wrote the book in Culoz beyond Grenoble, under the noses of the Nazis whom she lodged at their insistence. She had to walk seven and a half miles to town for food during this period. Writing of this book, Francis Hackett, Times reviewer, concluded, "Hers is a powerful personality, but it needed the American Army to liberate her." Her Talks With U.S. Soldiers In June, 1945, writing in The New York Times magazine section, Miss Stein analyzed the moral and intellectual fate of the young men of this generation. She based her comments on the frequent talks she had had in Paris with American soldiers and concluded that they would not become dissolute in the manner of the generation that lived in the wake of the first World War. Miss Stein's latest book was published only a week ago under the title "Brewsie and Willie" and was described by Charles Poore in last Sunday's Times Book Review as a book about what the GI's talked of when they gathered around her feet in Paris. "* * * or rather," Mr. Poore remarked, "what she would like to think they talked about, for Miss Stein is a very powerful character and things are apt to change dizzily when translated into Steinese." A new Gertrude Stein play, "Yes Is for a Very Young Man," which the author has described, despite the title, as "a perfectly simple, straightforward play, completely understandable," is scheduled to be presented on Broadway this fall. Apparently based in some degree on her "Wars I Have Seen," the play will deal with the emotional conflicts which divided France and much of the world during the heyday of fascism. Her other books included "Geography and Plays" (1922), "How to Write" (1931), "The World Is Round" (1939), and "Ida" (1941).
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