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In 1947, Katherine Anne Porter published an essay in Harper's Magazine titled "Gertrude Stein: A Self-Portrait" in which she accused Stein of "avarice" for the celebrity and financial success Stein had found in the wake of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. However, the essay is interesting less for what it claims- Stein-bashing was a full-fledged genre in the U.S. media by the 1940s-than for how it punctures Stein's aura. Porter's counter-narrative of Stein's life is also a counter-description of the space Stein made famous in her popular writings of the 1930s:
The pavilion atelier in rue de Fleurus was a catch-all of beings and created objects, and everything she looked upon was hers in more than the usual sense. Her weighty numerous divans and armchairs covered with dark, new-looking horsehair; her dogs, Basket and Pepe, conspicuous, special, afflicted as neurotic children; her clutter of small tables each with its own clutter of perhaps valuable but certainly treasured objects; her Alice B. Toklas; her visitors; and finally, ranging the walls from floor to ceiling, giving the impression that they were hung three deep, elbowing each other, canceling each other's best effects in the jealous way of pictures, was her celebrated collection of paintings by her collection of celebrated painters.1
Porter focuses on the social and spatial configuration of the atelier: Stein is emphatically at its center, possessing, consecrating, and equating (morally suspect operations, we know from Porter's irony) the persons, paintings, pets, and furniture that surround her.2 It is an insightful description of how a domestic space can be converted-through the self-mythologizing practices of Stein's popular autobiography-into a celebrity world. Persons, places, and things matter only insofar as they enhance and partake of the glamor of the star, or in Stein's own terms, "the genius." Porter, who is rarely mentioned in studies of AngloAmerican modernism, here anticipates recent literary historians in their analyses of modernist celebrity culture.3
Porter's critique of Stein helps illuminate the larger project of Porter's late fiction, which culminated in the novel Ship of Fools (begun 1941, completed 1961). Provoked by the conspicuous cultivation of a wide audience by high modernists such as Stein, Porter's writings of this period revise the genre of expatriate autobiography and insist on an outsider status for...