Remembering Gertrude

VIRGIL THOMSON

I KNEW Gertrude Stein very well. We were close friends
for twenty years, from 1926 till her death in 1946, and then
I knew her companion Alice Toklas for another twenty
years. I was very close to them both, almost a member of the fam¬
ily. But that dosen't mean I know everything about them. I'll give
you a day in the life of Gertrude Stein during the years when I
knew her, which began when she was fifty-two.

Like all middle-aged people she woke up. She didn't wake up
too early though. She would usually get up around nine. Earlier,
she used to sleep in the daytime, but 1 never knew her in those
days. She told me that she used to work at night and sleep in the
daytime, and also that she smoked cigars and drank wine. WHien I
knew her she was not smoking or drinking. She had revised her
hygiene at about the age of forty-five on account of the diagnosis
of an abdominal tumor, and her doctor told her she could either
keep it or have it out, but since she had had a medical education
herself—now this was around 1919 or 1920—she decided not to
have the operation but also to follow the medical man's advice,
which was to reduce her weight.

Now she had always been self-indulgent, or enthusiastic shall
we say, about eating, and the photographs and sculpture of her as
a large woman do not give you the woman that 1 knew, because
by the time I knew her she had taken off a great deal of weight.
She was very short, and so she still looked monumental, but ac¬
tually she wasn't the fat girl that's in the sculptures and early

Opposite: Virgil Thomson reminiscing about Gertrude Stein in his tallc
to the Friends at rlicir fall meeting, October 29, 1981.