During Gertrude Stein’s career, she had early difficulties getting published, leaving several of her works to be published posthumously. One of the earliest pieces she wrote after leaving medical school faced this fate, a text she titled “Q.E.D.,” which she seems to have placed in a drawer after completion and then forgotten. As described in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein had “never mentioned it” and “she came across two carefully written volumes of this completely forgotten first novel” that was left unnamed, but the details match the manuscript of ‘Q.E.D.’ (Stein 104). After Stein’s death in 1946, Toklas published the book under a different title in 1950, Things As They Are, in a limited edition by the small, artistic Banyan Press. Works published after her death are missing a part of Stein—her fundamental ideas as an author—that would have been present during a revision, editing, and publishing process that she oversaw personally. Things as They Are is a crucial example of one of these posthumous publications that exists without its author’s editorial presence as this book was written early in her career at a highly personal moment retelling her first heartbreak.
Things as They Are had a simple design with a hard cover that lists Gertrude Stein as the author; on the outside, there is no clue that it was published after her death. We also don’t know, from looking at it, that the book’s title was changed from “Q.E.D.” to Things as They Are. Within the book is a short addition to the copyright page explaining the publication’s posthumous date, the efforts of Toklas and Stein’s friend and literary executor Carl Van Vechten to make the text public, and their ownership of the copyright and manuscript, respectively.
Stein wrote the manuscript for “Q.E.D.” after a life-changing heartbreak as, some scholars say, a way to understand and come to terms with the situation (Souhami 54). After she graduated from Bryn Mawr College, Gertrude met May Bookstaver while she was a medical student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and they began a multiyear love affair. Because of the severe social stigma they would have faced as same-sex lovers, Stein and Bookstaver hid their relationship from their friends and family, including their close friend who introduced the pair, Mabel Haynes, who was also having an affair with Bookstaver. When Stein eventually learned about the simultaneous relationship between Haynes and Bookstaver, she was heartbroken and confused, and worked to avoid seeing and speaking with either woman. Stein went to London with her brother Leo and, in 1903, wrote about the relationships through characters who were given pseudonyms in “Q.E.D.,” short for Quod Erat Demonstrandum, Latin for “which was to be demonstrated.”.
The book clearly describes the love triangle that had consumed her for several years. However, she put it away after completing the book and seemingly didn’t share it or re-read it. After she died, the work was found in Stein’s personal papers. Van Vechten and Toklas worked together to publish many of Stein’s unpublished writings after she died so that her works could finally reach the reading public. The publication of this book after Stein’s death and the lack of her interaction with it significantly after 1903 separated Stein from Things as They Are and effectively, in some ways, removed the author herself from the book. “Q.E.D.” was the story she wrote, and her legacy was forever altered with its publication; however, as readers, we must ask how much the text was changed after its discovery and whether these changes create a largely different reading of the source. When the story was later republished in 1971 under its original title and in its original form, free of the edits made by Alice in the 1950 publication, it was alongside another left-behind adaptation of the love triangle, Fernhurst. In this retelling, possibly written at the same time, Stein shows the love story of two women pining for the same man in a school setting. This rewriting of the same story occurs multiple times through Stein’s work, as the same plot can be found in Melanctha from Three Lives. Melanctha was published while Fernhurstand Q.E.D. were left behind, which only furthers questions on why and whether the books would have taken a different form if Stein herself had carried them through the editing and publishing process.
In archives, we can find wonderful answers to questions about the past and gain insight into the workings of figures throughout history, including Gertrude Stein. However, the publication of this work only raises more questions about the motivations for its creation and postponed publication. This is what archives cannot offer: the realities of people’s lives. Answers to questions about the origins and evolution of “Q.E.D.” might be incomplete, but by delving into multiple archives and looking into letters from numerous people, such as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Carl Van Vechtan, Leo Stein, and many more, a better understanding of the events for its creation might be achieved. The absence of the book goes beyond the content and questions raised by it and into the author’s reasoning for its isolation. Answers that are hard-pressed to be found in an archive and might not exist beyond a book found after her death and edited free of life-ruining truths to be published as part of a promise made by Toklas and Vechtan to share Stein’s work with the world.
Bibliography
Diana Souhami, “First Love for Gertrude,” chapter 4 from Gertrude and Alice, 47–59.
Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library. “Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at Les Charwelles, June 12, 1934.” New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed December 19, 2023. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-cc65-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Stein, Gertrude, Alice B. Toklas, and Robert A. (Robert Alfred) Wilson. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas : Illustrated. First edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933.
Stein, Gertrude, and Robert A. (Robert Alfred) Wilson. Things as They Are : A Novel in Three Parts. Pawlet, Vt: Banyan Press, 1950. Print.
CURATING GERTRUDE STEIN 