Coda: “Nobody is alike Henry James.” Stein, James, and queer futurity

Summary

Now in the case of Henry James listen in the case of Henry James all of them … listened as if they did or indeed as if they did not hear. Indeed not … or if they all … did listen and did hear … all of this was not queer not at all not at all queer … Let us think carefully about all this.

(Gertrude Stein, Four in America, 1932–34)

Of course James was the precursor alright.

(Alice B. Toklas, Letters, 1947)

In a suggestive parallel, Henry James – both the body of his writings and the modern cultural construct that goes by that name – served as an important mediating term not just in Ernest Hemingway's marriages but also in the more stable and successful union between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (“Little Alice B. is the wife for me”). Like Hemingway's first two wives, Toklas brought “an undiminished chronically young enthusiasm for H.J.” to her new relationship with Stein in 1907 – an enthusiasm that led not to Stein's policing of James's presence, however, but to the couple's joint subscription to the New York edition of his works, possibly their earliest aesthetic-romantic bond.