Visiting with Authors: my Great Grandmothers and Gertrude Stein in 1933

I am awaiting the visit of a friend and her family this week.  Dawn Potter will be reading from her book, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton (University of Massachusetts Press, 2008) at the Writer's Center in Bethesda on Thursday, June 17. Dawn writes poetry and what I would call meditations of a life filled with reading (memoirs, but almost all relating to the experience of reading or observing). I also had the chance last week to talk with another friend who is a writer of fiction, and I am always reading works by people I know in history. All this makes me reflect on the role that "knowing" authors played in my family's past.

Gertrude Stein
Originally uploaded by George Eastman House

Every generation in the United States seems to have known some, but the experience intensified in the 1920s and 1930s. In Washington, DC, my great grandmother Marta Aresvik Putnam (known in the papers as Mrs. G. R. Putnam) was an active member of the Women's City Club and in early November 1933, she gave a review of Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. The book had just been released in a mass market edition and soon enough Stein and Toklas were traveling in DC to promote it.

The following year in December, the American Association of University Women hosted Gertrude Stein and my other great grandmother Lucy Lombardi Barber was an early pledge guest. The topic was "The History of English Literature as I understand it." When Stein was interviewed about Washington, DC, she said that she didn't really consider the place a town; notably saying there was more life in Toledo around a barber shop than in Washington. In the capital, she thought "There was too much government here, too much isolation from the life of the Nation." (Washington Post, December 29, 1934)

Woman reading in garden
Originally uploaded by George Eastman House

The family lore suggests that at this meeting, Lucy Lombardi Barber acquired a signed portrait of Gertrude Stein which she then passed down. Eventually my mother had it, and it was sold to support Bryn Mawr College scholarship funds. I will have to check my facts.

In the years since 1934, various family members have met, known, written about writers. I know I feel a certain sense of awe around anyone who composes a book and yet also a certain sense that I am allowed to comment on one, since I have written one of my own and known so many others. Not sure if that position is deserved.