Boarding trains, buses, and an airplane, the Four Saints company would assemble one last time for five performances in Chicago. Not all the original group made the trek in early November 1934—Frederick Ashton, Florine Stettheimer, and Chick Austin were absent. But for the first time, thanks to hastily made plans, the opera’s librettist was present.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas had arrived in New York just a week earlier on the first leg of Stein’s American lecture tour. Curtis Air offered them free round-trip flights for the opera’s Chicago premiere (a great advertisement for flying), and Carl Van Vechten offered to hold their hands when they got frightened (Gertrude said her only fears were of heights and indigestion). Harry Moses filled the cabin with American Beauty roses and a sign reading, “Rose is a rose is a rose.” On takeoff, Gertrude and Alice were beguiled by the airplane’s hum and the feeling of mounting. “The air seems so solid,” said Gertrude. She looked down on Pennsylvania, her home state, and saw in its shapes the lines of Cubism. In a moment of inspiration she took out a pencil and began to write notes for an opera about America. Although Carl Van Vechten called it the bumpiest ride on record and the plane arrived an hour late, Gertrude and Alice were unperturbed either by the ride or by the hordes of society women and newspaper reporters who had come to greet them at the airport. As they headed off for the historical Auditorium Theatre, an admiring photographer exclaimed, “Nuts! She’s the ritziest dame I ever tried to read.”
The airplane ride seem to have exacerbated Stein’s partial deafness. From her seat in Colonel Harold McCormick’s plushly appointed opera box at the center of the Golden Horseshoe, she grumbled that she could not make out her words clearly; she later told Henry McBride “she couldn’t hear half of it.”1 But she and Alice both relished the sets’ otherworldly brightness and Ashton’s choreography; as Stein approvingly observed, “They moved and did nothing.” At the first-act curtain they moved to an orchestra seat close to the stage. Now they could discern the words. After the final curtain had come down to thunderous applause, Stein announced to the press, “I think it is perfectly extraordinary how they carried out what I wanted.”2
After witnessing firsthand how the audience enjoyed her opera, she instructed NBC radio listeners to approach it without fear of incomprehension: “If you go to a football game you don’t have to understand it in any way except the football way and all you have to do with Four Saints is to enjoy it in the Four Saints way which is the way I am, otherwise I would not have written in that way.”3
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But it was not Stein’s desire to see or explain Four Saints that had brought her to America. She had returned, for the first time in thirty-one years, to experience her late celebrity face to face—and to escape the writing block that had plagued her for more than a year.
Just over a week earlier, on Wednesday, October 24, Gertrude and Alice had arisen at 6 A.M. as their ship, the S.S. Champlain, was arriving in New York. Stein dressed in a brown tweed suit with a cherry-colored vest, large, low-heeled, round-toed shoes, and woolen stockings. On her head she wore a Louis XIII hunting cap. The two women ascended to the upper deck, where they watched through the mist as Manhattan’s skyline came into view. Gertrude found it disappointingly low. A coast guard cutter filled with a dozen reporters approached from the Battery, and Carl Van Vechten stood on the pier in a bright purple-and-green shirt, his bracelets jangling as he waved. The press formed a ring around Stein in the Champlain’s lounge, squatting on the floor and perching on chairs and tables. Stein controlled her anxiety by throwing out the first gambit: “Suppose no one asked a question, what would the answer be?” The reporters quickly fell into line, asking many of the questions she had heard countless times. Stein told them she had come “to tell very plainly and simply and directly, as is my fashion, what literature is.” When Joseph Alsop, who had reported on the Four Saints rehearsal at St. Philip’s Church, asked why she did not write as she talked, Stein demonstrated her deft mastery of the sound bite. “Oh, but I do,” she said. “After all, it’s all learning how to read it.”
Ship-to-shore radio broadcast their arrival, afternoon papers gave them front-page headlines, and thousands of electric bulbs crawling around the New York Times Building spelled out, “Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York, Gertrude Stein has arrived in New York.” (Alice looked up and dryly observed, “As if we didn’t know it.”) Before their first evening was over, they had dined with Carl Van Vechten and the Pathé newsreel company had filmed them in their Algonquin suite. Stein was delighted with the attention she received from anonymous people on the street who called out to her and from shopkeepers who inquired about her transatlantic crossing. Alice reported to Henry McBride, “Gertrude said walking down the street in N.Y. was the realest and unrealest thing yet.”4
In the wake of her double success, Four Saints and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein had achieved a level of celebrity that astounded even the most jaded journalists. “For the first time in my experience as a New York newspaper correspondent a celebrity has come to America whose right to fame defies analysis,” concluded one. “She has created as great a sensation as would the combined appearance, in their heyday, of Charles Lindbergh, Gene Tunney, and ‘Peaches’ Browning.”5
Celebrity had flummoxed Stein and stopped her from writing. Just before her arrival, Vanity Fair published her candid description of her crisis:
What happened to me was this. When the success began and it was a success I got lost completely lost. You know the nursery rhyme, I am I because my little dog knows me. Well you see I did not know myself, I lost my personality. It has always been completely included in myself my personality as any personality naturally is, and here all of a sudden I was not just I because so many people did know me.6
Stein embraced that public personality over the next five months, as she and Toklas traversed the country in planes and cars and trains. She spoke to more than forty audiences—university students, members of women’s clubs, art collectors, and high school girls—and along the way she and Alice met a number of America’s great celebrities. Eleanor Roosevelt invited them to tea, George Gershwin played sections of Porgy and Bess for them, the mayor of San Francisco gave them the keys to the city. In Hollywood they dined with Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Dashiell Hammett, who asked how Stein had succeeded in getting so much publicity. It was a matter of having a small audience, she responded, for “the biggest publicity comes from the realest poetry and the realest poetry has a small audience not a big one.”
America was a joyous discovery. Observing her obvious glee, Alfred Stieglitz said to Stein, “I know what it is it is just a Christmas tree for you all the time.” She cherished the privileges and glitz of celebrity, and both she and Alice were reluctant to leave. Stein’s final scheduled lecture was envisioned as a gala event that would include Virgil Thomson playing and “the 2 nice saints” singing selections (“the Paris production” plus two). That evening, of April 29, would have been the only time that Thomson and Stein were on the same stage together; the sponsor was called, appropriately, the American Arbitration Association. Thomson wrote to Stein, “I am honored and will be only too delighted.” But Stein canceled that evening, objecting to the fact that admission was to be charged.
Stein’s final telephone call, her “farewell to America,” came from Beatrice Robinson Wayne, Saint Teresa, who told her how much the Four Saints cast liked singing her words—“they all did they all said all the words were such natural words to say.”
Carl Van Vechten accompanied Stein and Toklas to the dock on May 4. After they boarded the S.S. Champlain, Toklas descended into a black mood because she believed that nothing ahead could ever equal their American adventure. When they arrived in Paris eight days later, Stein told a reporter, “I was like a bachelor who goes along fine for twenty-five years and then decides to get married. That is the way I feel—I mean about America.”8
After its spectacular 1934 season in New York and its brief revival in Chicago later that year, Four Saints in Three Acts settled into a long hibernation. Thomson received proposals to send the opera on tour, to stage it in concert, to mount a puppet adaptation, and even to reconceive it as an opera about the Spanish Civil War. Thomson always acceded to the proposals but remained skeptical about their coming to fruition. “The epoch isn’t right,” he wrote to Gertrude Stein in 1938. “The original production isn’t forgotten enough. All of a sudden one day it will be forgotten and then Four Saints will be easy to perform and it will start its natural life as a classic repertory piece which I know will be a long life.”9
In fact, the epoch would not be right for several decades, and Four Saints has yet to become a classic repertory piece. Although many prominent contemporary critics rank Four Saints on a shortlist of great American operas (along with The Ballad of Baby Doe, Porgy and Bess, The Mother of Us All, The Medium), the opera is seldom performed.10
The American National Theatre and Academy mounted the first major revival in 1952, at the Broadway Theatre on Fifty-third Street, and it subsequently traveled to Paris. Rather than conceiving a new vision of the opera, Thomson aspired to re-create the 1934 production. He could now select his black cast from a larger pool of professionally trained performers—singers from the Juilliard School and dancers from the Katherine Dunham School. Only two members from the original cast re-created their roles: Edward Matthews as Saint Ignatius and Altonell Hines, now his wife, as the Commère. Although the musical performance was first-rate, the production unwittingly demonstrated the unrepeatability of the original’s peculiar success. The bright colors that had once looked shockingly chic were now called gaudy. The original production had prompted a ban on cellophane in Broadway theaters, and the 1952 synthetic alternative looked greasy and dismal. “It drooped,” Thomson sadly explained, “like the Pope’s balls.” Some critics applauded the playfulness of Stein’s words and Thomson’s adroit prosody, but other music critics, such as Irving Kolodin, voiced the fear that Four Saints was “significant for what it was rather than for what it is.”11 The exhilarating frisson of 1934—thriving on the avant-garde, high bohemia, and Negro chic—could not be duplicated in post–World War II America.
By this time modernism was ensconced in the museums, New York was the world’s art capital, and the International Style was beginning to dominate the skyline. New York’s social landscape had changed completely. Gone were the Prohibition speakeasies and Harlem music clubs that had offered the arena for hedonistic, racially mixed insouciance. The repeal of the Volstead Act at the beginning of 1934 and the Harlem riots of 1935 had spelled the end of Going Uptown. By the end of the 1930s, the fertile amalgam of bohemia, money, stylishness, and modernity seemed as frivolously anachronistic as an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. Even Vanity Fair went out of style; in 1936 the magazine was folded into Vogue, and Condé Nast charged Frank Crowninshield with advising on a new magazine, pitched to the working girl, called “Glamour with a ‘u.’ ”
New York’s salons decreased in number and paled in spirit. Muriel Draper was the first saloneuse to jump ship—six months after Four Saints premiered, she boarded the S.S. President Harding and set out to Russia to witness the Communist experiment firsthand. “GO FORTH SAINT THERESA,” wired her friend Esther Murphy.12 Draper would return to New York and a few years later her New Year’s Eve At Homes resumed in ramshackle spaces, but many of her guests had dropped away because of Draper’s now-dangerous socialist politics.13 The Stettheimers’ gatherings at the Alwyn Court ended when Mrs. Stettheimer died, in 1935, and the sisters moved out. The Askews’ gatherings were discontinued in the early 1940s. Kirk ascribed their end to the war, the expense, too much drinking, and age. But Thomson and other friends also ascribed the end to Constance’s displeasure. “Constance said to me, ‘I’m closing up,’ ” recalled Joella Levy. “ ‘Last Sunday I turned around and it was all men, not a single woman.’ ”14
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Four Saints has had a vital underground life, even though it was rarely performed and existed for a long time only in an incomplete 1948 recording. But over time the opera achieved a cultlike status as a landmark event in the history of the American avant-garde. It became a model for performance to come later in the century.
The opera offered no blueprint for new performance—it was too quirky to be successfully imitated—but it suggested new parameters for the stage. After Four Saints, it became possible to conceive of a performance as “a landscape,” without single focus or narrative progression. Physical relations between objects and sounds might supersede conventional drama. The stage could be reconceived as an arena for hypnotic and layered images, just as words and music could establish new relationships. “Theater was a limited art,” said Judith Malina, “and with very few exceptions it hadn’t caught up with dance or art or poetry. Everything in the modern theater has been touched by Stein’s reorganization of the English language. She freed the theater in every dimension. She simply plowed everything under and it allowed us a wide field to experiment with new forms. And the seeds she planted have continued to grow.”15
Four Saints taught theatrical producers that Broadway could accommodate both opera and Tin Pan Alley. George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess followed directly on the heels of Four Saints, opening in 1935, and broke its record as the longest-running opera on Broadway. (Eva Jessye was its choral director and Alexander Smallens its conductor.) Before the practice of opera on Broadway ended in the mid-1950s, the most prominent American operas opened on Broadway, including Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, The Saint of Bleecker Street, and The Telephone, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, and Marc Blitzstein’s Regina.
Only one of Gertrude Stein’s plays was performed during her life-time and her stage popularity did not improve after her death. But her influence could be felt in the works of others. Alice Toklas wrote to Carl Van Vechten after Stein’s death: “You know what Jane Heap said long ago—Gertrude Stein may not be the most read author—but she certainly is the most stolen author.”16 Her friend Thornton Wilder told Stein in 1937 that the third act of Our Town depended on her ideas—“the American’s right to remake himself a language from the fabric of the English language”—and described their relationship as a “deep-knit collaboration.”17 In the 1960s and 70s, the theater composer Al Carmines repeatedly turned to Stein for his works In Circles, Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, Listen to Me, The Making of Americans, and What Happened. When Carmines saw a production of Four Saints after completing his first Stein work, What Happened, it confirmed him in the desire, like Thomson decades before, to interweave his melodies and Stein’s pared-down words. “She offers the possibility for true collaboration because you are adding an element that Gertrude Stein doesn’t have,” Carmines said. “She adds precision and scientific pragmatism, and you add love and gentleness and passion and joy and sadness and all the traditions of American music.”18
For several decades after Four Saints’ premiere, Thomson’s music influenced few important composers. Interest began to revive in the late 1970s, when the minimalist compositions of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams were compared to Thomson’s work (notably by John Rockwell of The New York Times). Shortly after the 1976 premiere of Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, Tim Page, an early writer on Glass, described his first exposure to Four Saints: “I’d found the great, great grandfather/mother of what had gone since. And it didn’t sound old-fashioned at all.”19 In the last decade of his long life Thomson enjoyed a circumscribed popularity that had eluded him for most of his composing years.
Four Saints’ most lasting influence has been in blurring the lines between various branches of performance. Two hubs of the New York avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s, the Living Theater and the Judson Dance Theater, both incorporated Stein into their programs. The Living Theater’s first performance, a quartet of plays staged in Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s living room in 1951, opened with Stein’s Ladies Voices. James Waring, the éminence grise of the Judson Dance Theater, and choreographer Remy Charlip were deeply influenced by Stein. Closer to the present day, such performing groups as The Wooster Group and Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysterical Theater, and Robert Wilson’s collaborations, repeatedly draw from Stein’s use of words.
Four Saints prefigured the large-scale interdisciplinary performance works of the 1980s, which were often called operas, a newly popular catch-phrase of the period. The most influential figure in the shaping of these new spectacles was Robert Wilson, whose collaboration with Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach, became the landmark event of the era. Both Wilson and Glass have testified that Four Saints in Three Acts provided their only model for multimedia opera. In 1996 Wilson realized a decades-old ambition to stage Four Saints, producing it at the Houston Grand Opera, the Lincoln Center Festival, and the Edinburgh Festival. Other influential productions that integrated music and performance on a grand scale, in ways that suited neither Broadway theaters nor opera houses, included Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s The Gospel at Colonus, Meredith Monk’s Quarry, and Laurie Anderson’s United States, Parts I–IV. A new avant-garde “tradition” has been forged.
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The death of Rosetta Walter Stettheimer in 1935 released Florine and her two sisters from their joint caretaking and enforced sorority. Soon Ettie replaced her mother as the family invalid, and Carrie never again touched the dollhouse she had worked on for fifteen years. In her diary entry for September 30, 1935, Florine commemorated “The Collapse of Our Home”:
Goodbye Home
182 W. 58
the Allwyn [sic] Court
Salamanders, Crowns,
Cupids & Fleur-de-lys
farewell
While Carrie and Ettie moved together to the Dorset Hotel, Florine took up full-time residence in her studio. Her sisters initially regarded Florine’s separate quarters as desertion, while her friend Isabel Lachaise described the move “as a release—‘a Room of One’s Own,’ so to speak.”20 To mark the change in her life, Florine destroyed several old paintings and repeatedly redecorated her studio—adding new cellophane drapes and swags, inventing new gilded and beaded bouquets—until it exactly suited her taste. From a niche in her cocoon presided the marble bust of George Washington—“the only man I collect.”21 She attended parties less frequently and declined to join her sisters on their summer travels; as she put it, “The air in my lace bedroom is much better for me.”22 In her late sixties, she focused her dwindling energies on large and ambitious paintings, relishing her daily rhythms. She especially enjoyed painting at her easel, lunching only on brightly frosted pastries (“Things mean their colors,” she insisted).
On January 1, 1942, Florine began her last painting, Cathedrals of Art, a crowning work that encapsulated on canvas her perspective on the art world. Over the next two years, between long periods in the hospital, she repeatedly returned to the painting that stood taller than she did, giving up only six weeks before her death. Its three richly populated panels depicted the Stettheimers’ coterie of friends in the social context of the art world establishment: museum directors Alfred Barr and Chick Austin and art dealers Julien Levy, Kirk Askew, and Alfred Stieglitz are all there. Henry McBride holds signs commanding “Stop” and “Go.” Born under photographer George Platt Lynes’s bright lights, the painting’s protagonist, the infant Art, hopscotches on a Mondrian painting, then ascends a red-carpeted stairway to the high altar. Beneath a cellophane-and-gilt canopy stands Florine, in the guise of Four Saints’ Commère.
Kirk Askew repeatedly asked Stettheimer to let him exhibit her paintings and handle her estate. She hoped that the paintings could remain together after her death, but she also wanted them to disappear with her. Shortly before her death, she charged her lawyer, Joseph Solomon, with destroying them all, but she also considered giving her sisters free rein to distribute them. “I have a few unrealistic ideas for their future which I should like to tell you about,” she wrote Kirk Askew shortly before her death. But she succumbed to cancer before confiding her fantasies about her paintings’ ultimate disposition. She demurred until the end.
Florine died on May 11, 1944. Two weeks later, Henry McBride observed that her death had “passed as unremarked by the general public as did the poet Emily Dickinson’s,” and he predicted that Stettheimer would eventually hold an equally important position.23 The first step in her posthumous recognition was a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, arranged in 1946 by two of her oldest friends. Marcel Duchamp selected the paintings, and McBride wrote the catalog that finally situated Florine on the art map. Surveying her sister’s collected paintings in the museum, Ettie remarked to a friend, “I think that this is the beginning of something.”24
Alone now, for Carrie’s death had followed Florine’s by only six weeks, Ettie was responsible for arranging the disposition of her sisters’ art and artifacts. After giving Carrie’s unfinished dollhouse to the Museum of the City of New York, Ettie hired Peter Juley to photograph Florine’s studio and paintings, collected her stray verses into a slim volume called Crystal Flowers, and dispersed her paintings to museums around the country. “Florine will be rediscovered as an important figure,” prophesied her friend Pavel Tchelitchew, “a dreamer in the times when no one really dreamed well, when the garden of her life, the magical existence of all of you, is accepted as a reality.”25
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After the momentous events of February 1934, Julien Levy said that Chick Austin “might well forever after ride his star trailing clouds of glory.”26 Two years later he organized an event, the Hartford Festival, that aspired to the same ambitious scale and interdisciplinary focus. Students from the School of American Ballet danced in George Balanchine’s ballet Magic, and Virgil Thomson conducted the American premiere of Erik Satie’s Socrate against a backdrop by Alexander Calder. For the festival’s final event, the Paper Ball, the sleek floating planes of the Avery courtyard had been transformed by Pavel Tchelitchew into three tiers of onlookers painted on old newspaper. Live guests in specially designed costumes made choreographed entrances below, as Austin, aptly garbed as a circus ringmaster, recited poems written for the occasion. Lincoln Kirstein observed, “It was about the last public party in America designed as an illustration of the dominance of a certain scale of grandeur in taste and manners.”27
But the Depression-era trustees soon lost interest in Austin’s grand frivolity, and the frisson of excitement that had spurred his first decade gradually congealed into fear and controversy. His homosexuality became fodder for local gossip. Although Austin continued to treat the Wadsworth Atheneum as his personal staging ground for art, movies, ballet, grand balls, and magic, his golden period ended before the decade was out. By the time the United States entered World War II and a newly patriotic atmosphere took hold, Austin’s unique combination of playful subversion and avant-garde experimentation went out of style.28
By 1935 Alfred Barr had realized his 1929 manifesto for an interdisciplinary Museum of Modern Art, exhibiting, in addition to the traditional fine arts, architecture and design, film, and photography. In 1939, at the opening of the museum’s first permanent building, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “The conditions for democracy and for art are one and the same.” Barr was fired in October 1943, but he stayed on without a formal position, sequestered in a cubicle in a corner of the library, furnished with a chair and a sawed-in-half library table. In 1947, he returned to his old office as chairman of the museum collections, and he remained there for twenty years. “Of course Alfred would not leave,” said his wife. “It was his Museum. The Museum was his mistress.”
On December 6, 1934, Lincoln Kirstein’s School of American Ballet gave its first public performance at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Kirstein and George Balanchine created a series of ballet companies: the Ballet Caravan (1936), Ballet Society (1946), and, in 1948 and most enduringly, the New York City Ballet. Kirstein continued as general director until 1989, Balanchine until his death. Ballet in America is unimaginable without their stamp. Around the same time Kirstein founded the ballet, he turned against abstract art and photography and concluded that the Museum of Modern Art was “one of the worst influences on cultural history.”
In the spring of 1934, Philip Johnson curated an epochal exhibition, “Machine Art,” inaugurating the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection. After several years’ involvement with fascist politics in America and Europe, he returned to Harvard in 1940 to study architecture and found The International Style on his required reading list. But the popularization of International Style came only after World War II, when it became a standardized corporate style. Just as he had helped define modernism in architecture during the 1930s, Johnson subsequently helped promote the postmodern aesthetic in the 1970s and showcased deconstructivist architecture in the late 1980s.
Before his death at the age of 83, Henry Russell Hitchcock wrote twenty books and taught at Vassat, Wesleyan, Smith, MIT, Yale, Harvard, and New York University. He was widely considered to be the dean of American architectural history.
The course Julien Levy set for his gallery in its first few years continued until its end. He exhibited his stable of surrealist and neo-Romantic painters, including Max Ernst, Eugene Berman, De Chirico, Tchelitchew, and Joseph Cornell. During the war Levy joined forces with Kirk Askew to ride out the lean war years together. They closed the gallery in 1949.
At the end of 1944, Austin gave his last performance in the museum as the Great Osram, and two days later he resigned under pressure. “In a way it was curious he lasted so long there,” Henry McBride wrote Ettie Stettheimer, “for he ran the museum with a verve that amounted to genius, and the surprises he manged for us so enchantingly would, naturally, confuse and infuriate the stodgy trustees. A museum is never an easy berth for a genius.”29 Some of his Hartford friends thought that Austin had grown bored with the struggle he waged at the Wadsworth Atheneum; others maintained that he had been “crucified” by Hartford’s inherent conservatism. “Chick Austin was a kind of victim of the revenge that is taken on the advance-guard,” said Lincoln Kirstein.30 Many of Austin’s friends recognized that he had led them and excited their imaginations during what Philip Johnson called “those blazing years.” But Johnson also noted the inevitable end of the period: “It wasn’t that it left Hartford. It just ceased midair.”31
With the good fortune that seemed to grace his life, Chick Austin soon became the director of the John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. Its distinguished collection of Baroque paintings ideally suited his tastes. “I am really in a delirium about life again after those miserable fallow years,” he wrote his friend James Thrall Soby, “and having been afraid for a while that I COULDN’T work again, I now find that I can do more than ever and much more sensibly.”32 In 1946, he reopened the galleries that had been closed since John Ringling’s death a decade earlier, and in 1948 he expanded the galleries to include the Museum of the American Circus.
Since Sarasota was off the circuit of his friends, Austin felt isolated. “He knew he had put himself on the front line, done dangerous things,” his daughter recalled, “and he needed to be told what he had done.”33 His days increasingly regulated by Dexedrine in the morning and drink in the afternoon, driving around in his secondhand Rolls-Royce, Chick lived out his final years in sunny exile. He died on March 29, 1957, at the age of fifty-six.
The Family friends and museum colleagues gathered on a wet and blustery day in a Windham, New Hampshire, graveyard, on land that Austin had donated a year earlier, Just as Chick was interred, the sun shone fully for a brief moment; then the storm resumed. Some consoled themselves that Chick would not have liked growing old, and the day after his funeral Constance Askew felt his tangible presence: “I can see him—now—this minute—come into the room,—the laugh, the gesture with his hands, all the mannerisms, and the wonderful divine [story] about what had happened to him ten minutes before.”34 Many simply refused to believe that he had died. “Because Chick in my mythology was immortal,” Thomson wrote Helen Austin. “But of course he is because he has always been there whether we were with him or not. His reality was unerasable.”35
To the Harvard group Austin’s death signified the mortality of their invincible generation. “Chick was so much a part of all our beginnings in the modern world,” Philip Johnson wrote Helen. “He held it all together somehow. His death seems to mark sort of an end of a whole era.”36 Summoning up Austin’s golden moment on the night of February 7, 1934, Jere Abbott listened to his RCA phonograph record of Four Saints in Three Acts. “The Saints still sing lovely and beautiful,” he wrote Virgil, “and I thought of Chick and nearly wept.”37
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“That production was absolutely crucial to me,” John Houseman said in an interview in 1987, two years before he died. “In Four Saints I suddenly discovered what I wanted to do and it changed the whole course of my life.”
In the commercial theater the opera was regarded as “maverick” and “highbrow,” and it did not lead to Broadway offers for Houseman. His most important break came in the fall of 1935, when the Federal Theatre appointed him head of its Negro Theatre Project. In the wake of Harlem’s 1935 riots a few months earlier, many white people were wary about traveling uptown, but Houseman regarded it as a return to the scene of his happiest theater experience. Relying on the counsel of his Four Saints cohort Edward Perry to help negotiate the politics of theater in Harlem, Houseman organized more than seven hundred black performers and theater craftsmen into two units. One would perform contemporary plays by and about black Americans, the other would tackle the classic repertory. Virgil Thomson, who shared five apartments with Houseman during this period, constantly counseled him to follow the precedent of Four Saints: cast Harlem’s performers in plays that were not about black life.38
For the Negro Theatre Project’s first classic play, Houseman chose the notoriously difficult Macbeth, and to direct the production, he invited twenty-year-old Orson Welles. Set in the jungles of Haiti, the production was tagged “the voodoo Macbeth.” When the production opened on April 14, 1936, klieg lights filled the night sky over Manhattan, ten thousand people milled around the Lafayette Theatre, and Harlem’s northbound traffic was stopped for more than an hour. For its ten-week uptown run, every seat was filled, and it transferred to Broadway for an additional two months.
John Houseman remained in the background of the voodoo Macbeth, as he had in Four Saints and as he would for most of his career. He stayed with Orson Welles and helped found the notorious Mercury Theater in 1937. His involvement in Citizen Kane led him to movie production, a career that lasted two decades and resulted in such memorable films as Nicholas Ray’s debut, They Live by Night, Max Ophüls’s masterpiece, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful.
In 1969, at the age of seventy-one, Houseman appeared in front of the camera as Harvard Law School professor Charles Kingsfield in The Paper Chase. After winning an Academy Award for this supporting role, he was suddenly in great demand as an actor. The traits Houseman projected onscreen—crusty trustworthiness, competence, and cosmopolitan intelligence—were the same qualities Thomson had intuited on first meeting him in the Askews’ drawing room years before. Shortly before he died, at the age of eighty-six, he repeatedly turned back to that pivotal moment in his life: Why had Virgil chosen him? It had made all the difference: “That particular chemistry, that particular miracle that occurred has never been reproduced since.”
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When Frederick Ashton boarded the S.S. Berengia on March 22, 1934, he vowed to return to New York soon, but fifteen years passed before he did. Three years after Four Saints, he choreographed his second Gertrude Stein text, set to music by Lord Berners and called A Wedding Bouquet. After she met the choreographer, Stein asked Alice Toklas if he was a genius, and she replied, “More likely than any one we have seen for a long time.”
Four Saints retained a unique place in Ashton’s choreography, and he wrote to Virgil Thomson fifteen years later, “It brings back happy times when we were still in our twenties and when our natures were still passionate.”39 In the intervening years Ashton had created a brilliant repertory of classical ballets, culminating in his masterpiece, Symphonic Variations. In the years to come, he continued to choreograph prodigiously. Serving as the director of the Royal Ballet from 1963 to 1970, he was knighted and became a friend of the queen mother and an internationally acclaimed figure. (“Who would have thought this of little Freddie Ashton from Lima, Peru?” he asked friends.) Sir Frederick Ashton choreographed until the age of eighty-one and continued to believe that he had half an hour of choreography left in him. When he died, at eighty-four, in 1988, obituaries frequently observed that his death marked the close of an era in ballet shaped by the three masters Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, and Anthony Tudor. Ashton had delivered his own epitaph years earlier, when he said to an interviewer, “Choreography is my whole being, my whole life, my reason for living. I pour into it all my love, my frustrations, and sometimes autobiographical details.”40
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Most of the cast members of Four Saints never performed again in an opera or on a Broadway stage. They had been anonymous singers in choruses and church choirs, and to those most of them returned. Some, such as Beatrice Robinson Wayne (Saint Teresa), taught music or gave vocal lessons, while others became full-time homemakers or wage earners. A few would perform in productions of Porgy and Bess, and Edward Matthews (Saint Ignatius) had a distinguished stage career. Bruce Howard (Saint Teresa II) found more musical opportunities abroad, where, she declared, “I’m a black princess!”
The four cast members I tracked down nearly sixty years after the performance recalled the opera as a central and unforgettable event in their lives. If asked to sing, they usually declined because their voices had deteriorated. But if asked just to recall the words, they inevitably sang them. Words and music had been welded together at the time of the rehearsal, and memory had not separated them. The cast member who remembered the opera most precisely was Thomas Anderson. For the 1934 production he had kept a promptbook, and, as Virgil Thomson wrote, he “knew every move.” Anderson could still recall each detail in 1992 and acted bits of it out for me in his living room in Englewood, New Jersey, simulating the conductor’s moves and creating scenes in the space between the Naugahyde sofa and the dining table. “Now, why has that stayed with me all these years?” Anderson asked. “I remember it as if it were yesterday.”
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Abe Feder was among the youngest of the opera’s collaborators and the opera’s last known survivor; he died on April 24, 1997, at the age of eighty-seven. Early on he had been dubbed the “genius with light,” and he lived up to that title right into his eighties. Feder lit more than three hundred Broadway productions, including the voodoo Macbeth (1935), The Cradle Will Rock (1938), My Fair Lady (1956), and Camelot (1960). Believing that lighting extended beyond the stage, Feder lit everything from the altar of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the penguin house of the Bronx Zoo, from the United Nations to Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. His slogan was “Push back the darkness!,”41 and his last desire—unfulfilled—was to light the Sistine Chapel.
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When Gertrude Stein returned from her American tour in May 1935, she had achieved her twin objectives of fame and publication. She had encountered celebrity face to face, and her agreement with Bennett Cerf was a writer’s dream: each year she would select a previously unpublished manuscript from her store and Random House would publish it. Stein’s tour had also provided her a welcome diversion from her crippling writer’s block. Once she returned to the domestic routines of Paris and Bilignin, Stein again faced the blank pages of her notebooks. For the next ten years she continued to fill them, circling rudderlessly and obsessively around the theme of the genius’s personal identity amid public celebrity. She wrote a novel in desultory spurts over four years and called it Ida. Stein called Ida a new kind of saint, a “publicity saint,” and critic Donald Sutherland described her as a “combination of Helen of Troy, Dulcinea, Garbo, the Duchess of Windsor, and in particular ‘Gertrude Stein.’ ”42
When France entered World War II, Gertrude and Alice entered a five-year period in the south of France, cut off from friends and fame.43 The exile increased Gertrude’s longing for America. At the war’s end she conducted a radio broadcast to the United States: “I can tell everybody that none of you know what this native land business is until you have been cut off from that same native land completely for years. This native land business gets you all right.”44
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Despite the hoopla surrounding Four Saints in Three Acts, the man who had initiated it and assembled its collaborators reaped little immediate benefit. Virgil Thomson attracted no lecture agent, no publisher, and no opera company to perform Four Saints. A dozen years passed before Four Saints was recorded (even then it was only half the opera), and he waited fifteen years for the opera to be published.
In the blaze of publicity just after Variety reported that the opera had had more coverage than any show in a decade, Thomson thought the opera would sustain him indefinitely. On March 6, he reported, “The prognostic on Broadway is that we will continue doing business (here, on the road, in London, etc.) for at least two years.”45 Before the season was out, Thomson faced the brutal discrepancy between fashionable fame and money in the pocket, and by the fall of 1934 he was down to his last $20. Confronting his bleak finances in characteristically foursquare manner, Virgil stayed in New York and split his apartment rent with John Houseman for the next three years. When he found that musical venues in concert and orchestra halls were closed to him, he opened other doors, soliciting jobs through his Harvard and Four Saints connections. Lincoln Kirstein commissioned Thomson to compose Filling Station, a ballet that premiered in 1938 at Chick Austin’s Wadsworth Atheneum, and Houseman commissioned scores for Federal Theatre productions. Beginning in 1936, Thomson composed music for the movies: Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), and later Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story, which won him a Pulitzer Prize for music.
Thomson gamely composed for any venue open to him: the ballet, the theater, the movies, and the WPA. But he benefited little from the conventional music establishment, left or right. Neither the International League of Composers nor the International Society for Contemporary Music played Thomson’s music, and Four Saints’ commercial success rendered it suspect among music highbrows. Thomson fought back by deriding the various factions of the music world as “the taste boys,” “the League of Jewish Composers,” “the pseudo-educational rackets,” or “the Schoenbergians and the Bang-Bangs.” His residual bitterness lasted until his last years, when, at the slightest prompting, he would trot out his anti-Semitic theory that the Jewish mafia had excluded him.
From his position at the margins of the music world, he developed an “economic-aesthetic” theory about the links among money, music, performance, and critical attention—as he put it, “Who Does What to Whom and Who Gets Paid.” Thomson set down his opinionated wisdom at length, published in 1939 as The State of Music. Although the book sold only two thousand copies, it provided Thomson an ideal platform for his pungent wit. “The book was aimed at the profession and seems to be hitting its mark surprisingly,” Thomson wrote a friend. “It’s supposed to be just God’s truth every word of it and time somebody said same out loud.”
The book elicited an invitation to become the chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, widely considered the liveliest and most literate of New York’s eight daily newspapers. When the editor’s wife asked Thomson how he liked the idea of being the music critic, Thomson bluntly replied that “the general standard of music reviewing in New York had sunk so far that almost any change might bring improvement.”
Within the span of two days in October 1940, the Herald Tribune audience got a foretaste of the outrageous, slangy, no-nonsense prose that would appear over the next fourteen years. As if to announce that he was the brightest new bully on the block, Thomson’s leadoff review called the popular composer Sibelius “vulgar, self-indulgent and provincial beyond all description” and concluded with Maurice Grosser’s remark that he now understood why the New York Philharmonic was not part of New York’s intellectual life. He followed up the next day with a descriptive paean to the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which he glowingly described as America’s finest orchestra. His first two pieces for the Herald Tribune showed both sides of Thomson: the biting and the smitten, the sweet and the sour. His editor, Geoffrey Parsons, praised the Boston piece (“peaches and cream from every point of view”) but warned Thomson that his high-handed dismissal of Sibelius had been miscalculated and potentially alienating. He suggested that Thomson would now have to demonstrate that he wasn’t simply “a Young Pedant in a Hurry, with a Paris condescension.”
At the Herald Tribune Thomson shaped musical tastes for two generations. He expanded musical criticism to include everything from Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin at Carnegie Hall to Bishop Utah Smith playing an electric guitar at Newark’s Church of God in Christ, from Maxine Sullivan singing in a nightclub to John Cage playing at the New School for Social Research. As the organizer of the New York Music Critics Circle and an employer of critics, he shaped the musical establishment.46 Music historian Gilbert Chase summed up his influence: “We can only say that he is unscholastic, unacademic, unorthodox, and unregenerate.”47
His reviews, anthologized in several volumes, provided subsequent generations with an authoritative musical history of the period. Perhaps most pleasing to Thomson, publishers and conductors expressed a sudden interest in his music. “They used to know in advance that they did not want to encourage it,” he wrote a friend a year after assuming his critic’s post. “Now they know in advance they do. They still don’t bother to read it.”48 Before Thomson reached fifty, it appeared that he had achieved nearly everything he wanted, and at this midlife moment he came into Gertrude Stein’s orbit one last time.
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In 1934, after their first meeting since the break, Virgil had written Chick Austin, “Gertrude and I have kissed, I wouldn’t quite say made up, but kissed.” Thomson wrote in retrospect that their quarrel had been “purely Parisian” and not worth keeping up, because “for both of us [it] had long since lost its savor.” What he neglected to say was that the friendship, too, had lost its savor. Although Thomson frequently visited Paris in the late 1930s, he rarely saw Gertrude and Alice. Seven months after beginning his post at the Herald Tribune, he received a rare, warm letter from Stein: “And I am awfully pleased that success has come to you at last, you were always a believer in longevity, and I must say it is a pleasure, and I know you are liking it.”49 Then the onset of war restricted communication.
Shortly after the war ended, in 1945, Columbia University’s Alice M. Ditson Fund for music provided an opportunity for Thomson and Stein to reconcile. Recalling Four Saints, the committee members proposed a joint commission for an opera: Thomson would be paid $1,000 for the score and Stein $500 for the libretto. Stein accepted the invitation without objecting to the unequal payment, and the stage was set for a virtual replay of their earlier collaboration. Stein again proposed George Washington as a subject, and again Thomson refused on the grounds that everyone in the eighteenth century had looked alike. Then Stein selected as a protagonist another strong, tenacious woman who had been revolutionary and reviled in her lifetime: the late-nineteenth-century suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Honoring both Anthony and herself, she called the opera The Mother of Us All. In the fall of 1945, when Thomson read the first two scenes, he was heartened by Gertrude’s transparent identification with the heroine: “When she showed her in a scene of domesticity that might as well have been herself and Alice Toklas conversing about Gertrude’s career, I knew that she had got inside the theme and that the work would now be moving rapidly.”
Stein, at seventy-two, suffered from fatigue during the fall and winter, but she was buoyed by enthusiasm for The Mother of Us All and its inspiring heroine: “I think I did make her quite magnificent.” When Thomson received Stein’s libretto in late March, he called it “sensationally handsome” and thankfully much easier to dramatize than Four Saints. (Since Stein and Thomson had both been so pleased with Maurice Grosser’s earlier opera scenario, they again invited him to join the team.) Serving as the opera’s narrator, analogous to Four Saints’ Compère, was a character called Virgil T.
In May 1946, Thomson sailed to Paris, where he threw a dinner party for Gertrude and Alice. In honor of their renewed friendship, he served a jugged hare and a fine bottle of Château Lafitte. Carried away by his high spirits, he jokingly needled Gertrude, but he had miscalculated the fragility of the relationship; Alice jumped in protectively, warning that Gertrude might cry if he teased her. Stein subsequently sought to remove the character of “Virgil T.” from the opera. Although Carl Van Vechten persuaded her to restore “Virgil T,” the threat of excommunication continued until the end.
During the final months of her life, Gertrude Stein tied up all loose ends. Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein was willed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.50 She arranged with librarian Donald Gallup for the rest of her papers to go to Yale University, and she spent part of the winter destroying the materials she did not want to survive. With Carl Van Vechten she had planned an edition of her selected writings, and a month before her death she wrote the “Message from Gertrude Stein” that would introduce it. She appointed Carl Van Vechten to publish her unpublished writings after her death and allotted sufficient money to arrange that.
Gertrude Stein died at 6:30 P.M. on Saturday, July 27, 1946, and was buried in a double grave in Père-Lachaise Cemetery, the burial ground for renowned French cultural figures.51 The stone was simply inscribed with Gertrude’s name and dates on the front, and twenty-one years later, when Alice Toklas died, her name was inscribed on the back.
Two months after Stein’s death, Virgil Thomson began composing The Mother of Us All, and two months later he had set seven of the opera’s eight scenes. The opera’s setting in rural nineteenth-century America allowed him to draw from the wellspring of his childhood musical repertory in Missouri, and he incorporated gospel hymns and sentimental ballads, stately waltzes and vigorous marches. Thomson described his musical vocabulary as “the basic idiom of our country because they are the oldest vernacular still remembered here and used.”52
Before tackling the opera’s final scene—an epilogue featuring Susan B. Anthony immortalized as a marble bust, singing on a pedestal from beyond the grave—Thomson summoned up Gertrude Stein for one final evocation. On the printed page Susan B. Anthony’s last speech echoed Stein’s own final concerns:
In my long life of effort and strife.… Life is strife, I was a martyr all my life not to what I won but to what was done. Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know, do you know. In my long life, my long life.
The words became immeasurably moving when set to Thomson’s music. Limpid, plaintive, affirming, and intense, the last notes stretch out so long that the listener palpably feels Thomson’s reluctance to let the heroine go.
In music and words, Thomson at last achieved his reconciliation with Stein. The competitiveness and rivalry, the quarrels and nit-picking negotiations paled in comparison with Thomson’s indelible memory of Stein’s revolutionary impact, both on him and on the American language.53
Thomson would live forty-three more years, and into his nineties he continued writing, composing, lecturing, and tidying up his own prominent place in the history of the twentieth century. Four Saints in Three Acts remained one of the last things he still enjoyed remembering. “I am sorry now that I did not write an opera with her every year,” Thomson observed. “It had not occurred to me that both of us would not always be living.”54