Descriptive Summary
Administrative Information
Series Arrangement
Indexing Terms
Descriptive Summary
Title: Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude
Steiniana,
Dates: Circa
1890-1987 (bulk, 1929-1959).
Collection number: D.Mss.0014
Creator:
Metcalf, Addison M.,
(Addison McCrea Metcalf), 1914-1983
Extent:
30 linear feet (74 boxes + 4 map-case folders).
Repository:
Scripps College. Ella Strong Denison Library.Claremont, CA
91711
Abstract: Manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence,
photographs, programs, brochures, catalogs, posters, flyers, scripts, musical
scores, printed materials, artwork, sound recordings, ephemera, memorabilia, and
other materials documenting the life and work of Gertrude Stein, her reception by
contemporaries, and the influence of her legacy in the first three decades after her
death, collected by Addison M. Metcalf between 1945 and 1959. The materials include
manuscript and typescript letters from and to Stein; typescripts of several of her
works, some corrected in Stein's hand or that of Alice B. Toklas; typescripts and
galley proofs of published biographies, critical studies, and memoirs; and
typescripts of unpublished dissertations and fictional representations of Stein. The
collection also contains programs, posters, photographs, scripts, costume and set
designs, and other materials relating to the performance of Stein’s works; music
scores set to texts by Stein; catalogs, brochures, and other materials relating to
exhibitions of Stein's manuscripts and published works, and to museum and gallery
exhibitions of artwork formerly owned by Stein and her siblings, and of artists
collected, supported, and championed by her; contemporary and later copy prints of
photographs of Stein from 1905 onwards, including many by Carl Van Vechten; complete
original copies of almost all periodical issues in which Stein's work appeared
during her lifetime; correspondence from people who had known Stein, relating their
memories and "impressions” of her; artwork relating to Stein, including several
original pieces dating from her lifetime, and several commissioned by Metcalf
himself; sound recordings of works by and relating to Stein, performed by herself
and others; ephemera and memorabilia, including plates designed by Stein for Van
Vechten; and personal and family papers of Addison Metcalf himself.
Physical location: Please consult repository.
Language of Material: The materials in the collection are in English and French.
Administrative Information
Access
This collection is open for research.
Publication Rights
All requests for permission to reproduce or to publish must be submitted in
writing to Denison Library.
Preferred Citation
[Identification of item], Box #, Folder #, Addison M. Metcalf Collection of
Gertrude Steiniana (Collection D.Mss.0014), Denison Library, Scripps
College.
Source of Acquisition
Gift of Addison M. Metcalf, 1959, with additional gifts and bequest,
1960-1983.
Processing Information
Collection processed by Michael P. Palmer, July 2015.
Biographies
1. Gertrude Stein.
Gertrude Stein was born in Alleghany, Pennsylvania, on 3 February 1874, the
youngest of five children of Daniel Stein, a wealthy businessman, and his wife
Amelia Keyser. The family spent the year 1877/1878 in Vienna and Paris, and upon
returning settled in Oakland, California. Her mother died in 1888, and her
father in 1891, at which time the eldest son, Michael, took over the family
business affairs, and Gertrude and her sister went to live with the family of
David Bacharach (who had married their maternal aunt) in Baltimore. Stein
attended Radcliffe College from 1893 to 1897, where she was mentored by William
James, under whose guidance she and another student, Leon Mendez Solomons,
studied and published a paper on normal motor automatism. At James's urging,
Stein entered Johns Hopkins Medical School, although she professed no interest
in medical theory or practice. Confronting a male-dominated culture and
realizing she could not conform to the role expected of females, she failed
several classes and left after two years, without taking a degree. In 1902, she
followed her brother, Leo, to Europe; they settled in Paris the following year.
Between 1904 and 1914, at their shared household at 27 rue de Fleurus, the
Steins assembled a collection of modern art--in particular, Renoir, Cézanne,
Matisse, and Picasso--that for its size and quality was considered the most
important of its time. Gertrude also hosted a salon attended by many of the most
important artistic and literary figures of the day. Leo and Gertrude dissolved
their household, splitting their collection, in 1914, under acrimonious
circumstances. Gertrude retained the Picassos, most of the Matisse, and all but
one of the Cézanne; the bulk of this collection was dispersed over the years,
and at Stein's death consisted primarily of works by Picasso, Juan Gris, and Sir
Francis Rose.
Stein first began writing in 1903, beginning
Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum), an account of her ill-starred
relationship with Mabel Haynes, Grace Lounsbury, and May Bookstaver (not
published until 1950), and a first version of the novel
The Making of Americans (finished in 1911, published in 1925), a
fictionalized account of her own family. Stein met Alice B. Toklas, her life
partner, in 1907; they took up residence together in 1910. Her first published
book,
Three Lives, appeared in 1909, as did her
short essays on Picasso and Matisse, the first English-language texts to be
published on these artists.
Tender Buttons was
published in 1914. Stein and Toklas were absent from Paris during much of World
War I. Stein acquired a car in 1917, and she and Toklas used it as a truck to
carry supplied for the American Fund for French Wounded, supplying hospitals in
Perpignan and Nîmes. They returned to Paris in 1919, where many of the French
members of Stein's salon dispersed, to be replaced by young American
expatriates. In 1922, Stein first met Ernest Hemingway, and the phrase most
associated with her, "rose is a rose is a rose", first appeared in print, in
Geography and Plays. In 1926, Stein's lecture
on her own writing style, "Composition as Explanation", was published by Leonard
and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press. In 1927, Stein first met the composer Virgil
Thomson, and began work on the libretto for their opera,
Four Saints in Three Acts; Toklas also cut Stein's hair in the
short, masculine style that was her signature look the rest of her life. In
1928, Stein wrote
How to Write, reflections on
language, grammar, sentences, and grammar. The following year, Stein and Toklas
rented the house in Bilignin (Ain) that became their summer residence. In 1932
Stein wrote
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
her first accessible book; it was published the following year and became a
bestseller, making Stein an international star.
Four
Saints in Three Acts
premiered in 1934, directed by John Houseman,
with choreography by Frederick Ashton. From October 1934 to May 1935, Stein
toured the United States to popular acclaim, although confounding some critics.
In 1936, Stein lectured at Oxford and Cambridge, and met with Lord Gerald
Berners, who set her "They Must Be Wedded to Their Wife" as a ballet,
The Wedding Banquet. The ballet was first performed
the following year, and became part of the standard repertory of Sadler's Wells
Ballet (later the Royal Ballet) for the next 20 years. Also In 1937, the lease
on 27 rue de Fleurus ran out. In 1938, Stein and Toklas moved to 5, rue
Christine, and Stein wrote the play
Dr. Faustus Lights
the Light
s, and her only children's book,
The
World Is Round
.
Stein and Toklas waited out the war in France, first in Billignin, and after the
lease was cancelled in 1943, at Le Colombier, a house in the nearby town of
Culoz. Although both Stein and Toklas were Jewish, they were protected by the
historian Bernard Faÿ and, most probably, by Stein's status as a famous
American. Stein continued to write during the war years, including
Paris, France (1939, published in London in 1940),
in homage to Paris, the novel
Mrs. Reynolds, and
The Winner Loses: A Picture of Occupied
France
. Stein's concern for France led her to sympathize with
Marshal Petain, and she attempted an English translation of Petain's
Paroles aux français. The American press reported
the "liberation" of Stein and Toklas in September 1944, and she became immensely
popular with GIs. Shortly afterwards, Stein wrote a play about life in an
occupied country,
In Savoy: A Play of the Resistance in
France
, that premiered as
Yes Is For a Very
Young Man
in Pasadena, California, in 1946. In December 1944, Stein
and Toklas returned to Paris. Stein's autobiographical
Wars I Have Seen, begun in 1941/42, was published in 1945, becoming
one of her most successful works. That same year, Stein visited American
military bases in Germany, wrote
Brewsie and
Willie
, a portrait of GIs in Europe, and began work on the libretto
for her second opera with Virgil Thomson,
The Mother of
Us All
, about the suffragist Susan B. Anthony; she finished the
libretto the following year. She died in Neuilly, near Paris, on 27 July 1946,
age seventy-two, following surgery for colon cancer; she was bured in Père
Lachaise cemetery, Paris, on 22 October. Alice B. Toklas survived Stein by
twenty years, dying on 7 March 1967; she is buried at Stein's side.
2. Addison M. Metcalf.
Addison McCrea Metcalf was born on 29 April 1914, in New York City, the younger
child and only son of Williard L. Metcalf (1858-1925), artist and a founding
member of the “Ten American Painters”, and his second wife, Henriette Alice
McCrea (1888-1981). His parents separated a few years after his birth. He was
raised partly in California, where he attended Webb School of Claremont. He was
living in Long Beach, California, in 1935, and later studied in Europe,
returning to the United States in August 1939. He attended the University of
California at Berkeley for approximately two years, before enlisting in the U.S.
army on 16 December 1941 at Hartford, Connecticut. After serving for four and
one half years (apparently, with a slight physical deformity, as a baker,
although he stated publicly that he was in military intelligence), he settled
near his mother in Newtown, Connecticut, where he opened an antique shop, "At
the Sign of the Fleur de Lys". In the early 1960s, he moved to New York City,
where he worked as a librarian, first at the American Foundation of Religion and
Psychiatry, and latterly at the Law Library at Fordham University. He died in
New York City on 16 June 1983.
Metcalf became interested in Gertrude Stein and her works while still a student
in California. Encouraged by Ella McKenna Friend Mielziner, the widow of the
painter Leo Mielziner and a friend of Stein from the latter's early, formative
years in Paris, he began seriously collecting works by, and materials relating
to, Stein after he settled in Connecticut in 1945, and by the mid-1950s had
built a collection that according to Stein's literary co-executor, Carl Van
Vechten, was second only to Stein's official archive at Yale University. In
1955, Metcalf sponsored the publication of
Absolutely Bob
Brown; or, Bobbed Brown, a previously unpublished portrait by Gertrude
Stein
. In 1964, he wrote and performed "A Sentimental Journey
Through the Works of Gertrude Stein", a one-man show of extracts from Stein's
works. He also recorded selections from Stein's works that were issued by
Folkways Records as "Mother Goose of Montparnasse" in 1965. Metcalf donated the
bulk of his Gertrude Stein collection to Denison Library, Scripps College, in
June 1959, adding further donations in following years, with a final bequest at
his death. In his will he also bequeathed to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters funds to create two biennial awards of $10,000 to honor young writers
and artists of great promise, the Willard L. Metcalf Award in Art and the
Addison M. Metcalf Award in Literature.
Scope and Contents of Collection
The Addison M. Metcalf Collection of Gertrude Steiniana consists of manuscripts,
typescripts, correspondence, photographs, programs, brochures, catalogs,
posters, flyers, scripts, musical scores, printed materials, artwork, sound
recordings, ephemera, memorabilia, and other materials collected by Metcalf,
primarily between 1945 and 1959, to document the life and work of Gertrude
Stein, her reception by contemporaries, and the influence of her legacy in the
first three decades after her death. Together with over 450 published volumes,
held elsewhere in Denison Library, these materials constitute what Carl Van
Vechten, Stein's literary executor, considered in the 1960s to be the greatest
contemporary collection of Steiniana outside her official archive at Yale.
The collection is divided into eleven series.
Series 1: Manuscripts and typescripts, contains manuscript and typescript letters
from and to Stein; typescripts of several of her works, some corrected in her
hand or that of Alice B. Toklas; typescripts and galley proofs of published
biographies, critical studies, and memoirs; and typescripts of unpublished
dissertations and fictional representations of Gertrude Stein.
Series 2: Performance files, contains programs, posters, photographs, scripts,
correspondence, reviews, costume and set designs, and other materials relating
to the performance of Gertrude Stein’s works. The wide scope and range of the
materials, encompassing professional, college, and local productions, is the
result of Metcalf's goal to document every performance of Stein’s works within
the United States, and whenever possible, elsewhere, prior to 1960. The
materials from the premiere performances of
Four Saints
in Three Acts
, and the materials relating to the Living Theatre's
performances of
Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights
and
Ladies' Voices are of particular
interest.
Series 3: Scores and sheet music, contains music scores, primarily by Virgil
Thomson and Martin Vernon, set to texts by Gertrude Stein. Many of the scores
are in manuscript (photostat) and inscribed by the composer.
Series 4: Exhibitions contains catalogs, brochures, programs, posters, and other
materials relating to exhibitions of Gertrude Stein's manuscripts and published
works, and to museum and gallery exhibitions of artwork formerly owned by
Gertrude Stein and her siblings, and of artists collected, supported, and
championed by Gertrude, in particular Picasso, Matisse, Francis Rose, and Juan
Gris.
Series 5: Photographs, contains contemporary and later copy prints of photographs
of Gertrude Stein from 1905 onwards. Many of the images were taken by Carl Van
Vechten, and most of these are signed by him. A large number date from the
period 1934-1937, and include photographs of Stein at Bilignin and during her
United States tour.
Series 6: Printed materials, contains complete original copies of almost all
periodical issues in which Gertrude Stein's work appeared during her lifetime.
Additional periodical issues, published during and after Stein's lifetime,
contain reviews and discussions of Stein's works, American literature, modern
art, and American expatriots in France between the World Wars; many of the
articles are signed by the authors. The series also includes clippings of
newspaper articles from a scrapbook compiled by Metcalf in the 1950s, relating
to Stein, her works, her interest in art, her contemporary reception, and her
legacy..
Series 7: Correspondence, contains Metcalf's correspondence relating to Gertrude
Stein and the formation of his collection of Steiniana. The correspondence (the
bulk being letters received) consists of routine correspondence from
booksellers, galleries, producers, photographers, and newspapers; correspondence
from other Stein admirers and collectors; correspondence from scholars, sharing
their knowledge and expertise; and, of particular importance, correspondence
from people who had known Stein, relating their memories and "impressions” of
Stein. The correspondence also sheds light on Metcalf's own personality, his
monomania for Gertrude Stein, and his romantic obsessions.
Series 8: Artwork, consists of artwork, both original and reproduction, relating
to Gertrude Stein, collected by Addison Metcalf between approximately 1950 and
1970. Of the original pieces, the charcoal portrait by Peggy Bacon (1935), the
watercolors by Stephen Longstreet (1928-1938), and the collage by Pavel
Fyodorovitch Tchelitchew (1929), date from Stein's lifetime. The series includes
a number of works dating from the years 1963-1966, by Edward Meneeley, Albert
Vanderburg, Howard Hussey, and David Prentice, of which some, and possibly all,
were commissioned by Metcalf.
Series 9: Sound recordings and film, consists primarily of sound recordings of
works by and relating to Gertrude Stein, performed by herself and others. Of
special interest are the recordings of Stein reading from her own works during
her 1934-1935 United States tour; performances of several of her works; and a
telecast of Pat Bond's one-woman show,
Gerty, Gerty,
Gerty, Is Back, Back, Back
(circa 1979).
Series 10: Ephemera and memorabilia, contains ephemera and memorabilia relating
to Gertrud Stein. The most important items are two plates designed in 1930 by
Gertrude Stein for Carl Van Vechten, and executed by a pottery in the
neighborhood of Bilignin, and two catalogs of Stein's works from 1930-1931.
Series 11: Personal and family papers, contains personal and family papers of
Addison Metcalf. The most noteworthy materials are found in the James Ringo
correspondence file, donated to the collection in the 1980s by Ringo, which
contains letters of a personal nature from Metcalf to Ringo, and letters to and
from Metcalf's relatives discussing the circumstances of his death. The series
also includes a number of items relating to Metcalf's father, the painter
Willard L. Metcalf.
Series Arrangement
The collection is arranged in the following 11 series:
- Series 1: Manuscripts and typescripts
- Series 2: Performance files
- Series 3: Scores and sheet music
- Series 4: Exhibitions
- Series 5: Photographs
- Series 6: Printed materials
- Series 7: Addison Metcalf correspondence
- Series 8: Art works
- Series 9: Sound recordings and film
- Series 10: Ephemera and memorabilia
- Series 11: Addison Metcalf personal and family
Indexing Terms
The following terms have been used to index the description of this collection in the
library’s online public access catalog.
American fiction--20th century
Americans--France--Paris--Biography
Art--Collectors and collecting--France--Paris
Ballet
Biography
Correspondence
Drama
Opera
Paris (France)--Intellectual life--20th century
Photographs
Picasso, Pablo, 1881-1973
Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946
Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946--Criticism and
interpretation
Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946--Friends and associates
Stein, Gertrude, 1874-1946--Musical settings
Toklas, Alice B., 1877-1967
Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964
Women and literature--United States--History--20th
century
Women authors, American--20th century