ALLAN STEIN
A Novel
Matthew Stadler
Fourth Estate
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Fourth Estate
Copyright © Matthew Stadler 1999
Excerpts from Federico Garcia Lorca’s “Galeca of Love Unforseen,” translated by Edwin Honig in Four Puppet Plays/Play Without a Title/The Divan Poems and other poems/Prose Poems and Dramatic Pieces. Copyright © 1990 by Edwin Honig. Reprinted by permission of Edwin Honig.
Excerpts from Jonathan Richman’s song “Pablo Picasso” reprinted with permission of Modern Love Songs.
Excerpts from Sylvia Salinger’s letters in Just a Very Pretty Girl from the Country, edited by Albert S. Bennett. Copyright © 1987, Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.
Excerpts from Michael Stein’s letters to Gertrude Stein in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.
Excerpts from Sarah Stein’s letters to Gertrude Stein in the Beinecke Library of Yale University. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.
Excerpts from Sarah Stein’s letters to Gertrude Stein in the Bancroft Collection, University of California, Berkeley. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Gertrude Stein.
The right of Matthew Stadler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9781841151083
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN: 9780007483174 Version: 2016-01-13
For Larry Rinder
What is the use of being a boy
if you grow up to become a man,
what is the use?
—GERTRUDE STEIN
Contents
We arrived at noon and left our bags with a woman who said she worked for the hotel. There was no one else on the platform when the train pulled away, only this stout, very serious woman, some complacent mongrel edging along a ditch sniffing for scraps, plus me and the boy. She had a pushcart littered with dried flowers, and we put our bags on that. The hotel turned out to be more of a ruin, really, than a hotel, but she couldn’t very well have said, Hello, let me take your bags, I work for the ruin. Off she went, with the flowers and the bags, down the one narrow road toward town.
I was light-headed from the air, which was breezy and, after two days of freakish winter snow without proper mittens or what-have-you, at last springlike and warm. Ocean and pine and dust mixed with heady currents of mimosa and the fresh iodine tang of seaweed left stranded on the rocks by an outgoing tide. The boy stared at the sea, probably exhausted by his fever and my having kept him up all night with the cool washcloth and the wine. It was unnaturally beautiful. Red, crenelated rock broke from the scruffy pine headlands, crumbling toward the sea, carpeted in patches with lavender, rosemary, and scrub brush. The sea was blue like metal. Where it touched the rock there was no blending, just the sharp brick-red rock against the cold metal sea. The strand of beach between the rigid headlands was white, the sand imported from some other shore so that it looked false, like a fancy ribbon or prize strung across the flushed bosom of a very determined young farm girl. (I remember her standing in a meadow of bluebells, this particular girl—not a farm girl at all, really, as it is my mother I am recalling, whose image was suggested by the falseness of the beach at Agay—sunshine raking the steep