She Will, Indeed: Gertrude Stein and the American Art of Not Fitting In

 

Paris, France is exciting and peaceful, Gertrude Stein tells us at the outset of her oddly seductive 1940 cultural reverie, Paris France. That’s a big promise for a slim book—especially one that reads like a high-society dinner conversation halfway through the second bottle of Burgundy. But here’s the twist: she’s not wrong. At least, not entirely.

Fact is: Stein, by the time she wrote this, had already cemented herself as the idiosyncratic empress of Left Bank modernism—a literary lioness, a Picasso-painted personality, and the ringmaster of one of the most influential salons in art history. But Paris France, published the same day the Nazis marched into Paris, is not a shout from the barricades. It’s a louche, looping love letter to French civility—written by a woman who believed that true Frenchness was a kind of innate genius for logic and lunch. After all, “Paris was the natural background for the 20^th century, America knew it too well, knew the 20^th century too well to create it, for America there was a glamour in the 20^th century that made it not be material for creative activity.”

What we get here is less a memoir and more a mood: a 120-page sketch of a nation filtered through the musings of a woman who adored it like an old lover. And like all old lovers, she’s not always fair—or accurate.

The Paris of Gertrude Stein's Mind

Stein’s Paris is one of lace doilies and perfect cheese, of women who dress well because it’s what’s done, and men who reason because it’s in their nature. There’s something charming about her certainty, like watching someone lecture about a city she built herself from scratch.

There’s also something distinctly American about it, when “France cannot change it can always have its fashions but it cannot change” and “fashion must never be useful, must very often be exotic, and must always be made to be french” (love the spelling BTW).

Stein writes France the way Americans dream it—civilized, aesthetic, ineffably wise. But her portraits of the French people occasionally veer into essentialism. She claimes:

·        The French are not emotional.

·        Frenchmen love older women, that is women wo have already done more living […]

·        […] a Frenchman is always dependent upon his mother, and so a frenchman’s is always a mean because there is nothing inevitably different between a boy and a man in a frenchman’s life […]

She claims things like that, with the same finality you’d expect from someone explaining why Bordeaux is better than Burgundy (it isn’t, and she’d know).

The sweeping generalizations about nations, national mentality, culture and other matters of taste may be dressed in intellectual finery, but they’re still generalizations. Chic, in their deceptively easy, reductionist design. But more than a little snug around the seams.

And yet, it’s hard not to fall under the spell of her voice, which moves with the offhanded rhythm of someone too clever to care if you’re following. The prose is repetitive, yes. At times, it circles around like a Parisian roundabout—elegant, confusing, and impossible to exit. But when read aloud (as critics recommend), the language blooms with unexpected charm. You can almost hear the clinking of wine glasses in the background.

A More Elegant Time, or Just a Better Dinner Party?

It’s worth remembering that Paris France isn’t just about France—it’s about Stein’s version of it. A fantasy preserved in aspic, served cold with wit and a garnish of exile. This was a woman who fled the misogyny of Johns Hopkins, who shrugged off the conventions of American womanhood, who found in Paris a place where she could be—unapologetically—herself. And in that sense, this book is less a cultural study and more an act of self-portraiture.

She describes the French with the same confidence that Picasso used when he painted her: not exactly how she looked, but exactly how she’d be remembered.

And yes, the book is tinted with the gold of nostalgia and the sepia of self-delusion. But it’s also laced with an optimism that feels radical in a time of global unraveling. As tanks roll toward the city, Stein writes about logic and style. It shouldn’t work—but somehow, it does.

The Verdict: Worth the Glass of Wine

Should you read Paris France? Absolutely—especially if you can do it in a café with a strong espresso and no agenda. It’s brief, brilliant in bursts, and undeniably stylish. You may not learn much about France, per se, but you’ll learn something about how an American expatriate defined it.

And while she may not convince you that French people are born logical or that fashion equals morality, she’ll leave you thinking—and maybe even smiling.

As for me? I liked the book. I admired the chutzpah. I was occasionally annoyed, occasionally awed.

Paris France is less a map than a memory palace—messy, subjective, gorgeously decorated. If Hemingway was the brawler in Parisian cafés, Stein was the hostess in the salon. And in this slim, strange, elegant little book, she sets the table one more time. Bon appétit.