Birthday: The literary hostess

Alice Babette Toklas (1877- 1967)

Author

The Writer’s Almanac says, “she also wrote three books, none of which is The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas — that was the title Gertrude Stein gave her own autobiography, written from the point of view of her lover.” When Toklas died, The New York Times- skittish about irregularity in life, the paper didn’t use the word “gay” until 1987- cast her as cohostess of a famous literary salon and, in paragraph two, a legendary art widow:

With Miss Toklas's death, an important art collection--27 Picassos, 7 Juan Grises and a Matisse-- will pass into the possession of Miss Stein's relatives in the United States.

She grew up in San Francisco. Her father was a Polish cavalry officer. She studied at the University of Washington, thought of a career as a concert pianist, and, after the Great San Francisco Earthquake leveled her hometown, she traveled. In one of the more fateful disembarkations in literary history, Alice arrived in Paris on September 8, 1907. At a gathering hosted by friends that day, she met another American expatriate called Gertrude Stein. Oddly- they had both grown up in San Francisco, they had not met before.

In 1963 Toklas wrote of that day,

"In the room were Mr. and Mrs. [Michael] Stein and Gertrude Stein. It was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since them. She was a golden brown presence, burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair."

But they hit it off, and, after some toing and froing with living arrangements, Alice moved to 27, rue de Fleurus in 1910, where Gertrude and her brother Leo lived. The Steins had an acrimonious parting in 1911 (he loathed the relationship with Alice, and Alice herself, calling her “an abnormal vampire”). When Leo moved to Florence in 1914, they divided the extraordinary art collection they had accumulated. He took the Renoirs and Cezannes; she kept the Picassos and Rousseaus.

Alice was easy to mock, or overlook entirely. W.G. Rogers wrote,

"She was a little stooped, somewhat retiring and self-effacing. She doesn't sit in a chair, she hides in it; she doesn't look at you, but up at you; she is always standing just half a step outside the circle. She gives the appearance, in short, not of a drudge, but of a poor relation, someone invited to the wedding but not to the wedding feast." James Merrill wrote that before meeting Toklas "one knew about the tiny stature, the sandals, the mustache, the eyes," but he had not anticipated "the enchantment of her speaking voice—like a viola at dusk."

Of their relationship, The New York Times wrote:

Potpourri of Skills

"What would Alice have been without Gertrude?" a friend of Miss Toklas and Miss Stein once asked.

For nearly 40 years--from about 1907 to 1946, when Miss Stein died--Miss Toklas and the writer were inseparable companions, faces in the mirror to each other, and conductors of probably the most renowned cultural salon in the world.

At their Paris homes they gathered a dazzling array of the famous, the ambitious, the wealthy and the curious--Ernest Hemingway, Carl Van Vechten, T.S. Eliot, Alfred North Whitehead, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thornton Wilder, Picasso, Matisse, Gris, Braque, Virgil Thomson, Charles Chaplin, Sherwood Anderson, Glenway Wescott, Paul Robeson, Jo Davidson, Pavel Tchelichev, Ford Madox Ford and Richard Wright, to name some.

Miss Toklas stood so much in Miss Stein's larger reputation that it was said that "Alice sat with the geniuses' wives." In fact, however, Miss Toklas was by no means such a dimmed figure, according to Robert Lescher, Miss Toklas’ editor.

She took a perceptive part in the literary and art conversations that frequently swirled all afternoon and far into the night. This is also attested by Miss ' autobiography and that of Miss Stein. Nevertheless, Miss Toklas was mainly content to let Miss Stein scintillate in public, while she operated the household.

'She Ran the House'

"Alice Toklas neither took life easy nor fraternized casually," Mr. Thomson wrote in "Virgil Thomson," published last year by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

The composer wrote:

"She got up at 6 and cleaned the drawing room herself, because she did not wish things broken. (Porcelain and other fragile objects were her delight, just as pictures were Gertrude's. She liked being occupied anyway, and she did not need repose, ever content to serve Gertrude or be near her.

"She ran the house, ordered the meals, cooked on occasion and typed out everything that got written into the blue copybooks that Gertrude had adopted from French schoolchildren.

"From 1927 or '28 she also worked petit point, matching in silk the colors and shades of designs made especially for her by Picasso."

Made an Odd Couple

Miss Toklas and Miss Stein were an oddly contrasted couple. Miss Stein was massive, with a large face and close-cropped gray hair. Miss Toklas was small and wispy and at one time had brown hair, which she wore bobbed and with bangs. "Nicely ugly," was the way James Beard, the gourmet and cooking authority, described her.

"Alice was one of the really great cooks of all time," Mr. Beard said. "She went all over Paris to find the right ingredients for her meals. She had endless specialities, but her chicken dishes were especially magnificent. The secret of her talent was great pains and a remarkable palate."

Miss Toklas wrote two cookery books--"The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book" and "Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present," both published by Harper. The former contained a recipe for fudge made with marijuana or hashish, which, she said, "anyone could whip up on a rainy day." Taxed with this, Miss Toklas shrugged and remarked:

"What's sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander. But it's not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen."

If Miss Stein dominated the couple's salon, Miss Toklas seemed to command Miss Stein. "Small or not, she was steel, absolutely," Mr. Lescher recalled. Several instances of Miss Toklas's influence have been recorded. One occurred in 1935, when Miss Stein was giving a shipboard interview to a group of reporters in New York.

"Miss Toklas's slight, menacing figure appeared in the doorway," The New York Herald Tribune's account read.

"'Come, lovey,' said Miss Toklas, in a steely-sweet voice. 'Say goodbye to your guests. They are leaving.'

"Miss Stein leaped to her feet and bounded off into the corridor."

...Miss Toklas recounted her association with Miss Stein (she called her "the mother-of-us-all") in "What Is Remembered," published in 1963 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Her style, in sharp distinction to Miss Stein's convolutions, was simple, spare and economical. It was, indeed, the same style in which Miss Stein had written her autobiography in 1933. Published by Random House, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas," related Miss Stein's life as if Miss Toklas were the narrator.

Pressed for funds, Stein turned out The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas on spec. It was her own story, of course, but told through Alice’s eyes: the composer Virgil Thomson, who set Stein’s work to music in the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, said,

The book is in every way except actual authorship Alice Toklas' book; it reflects her mind, her language, her private view of Gertrude, also her unique narrative powers. Every story in it is told as Alice herself had always told it.... Every story that ever came into the house eventually got told in Alice's way, and this was its definitive version.

The book was a hit, and in 1934, Gertrude and Alice did a barnstorming American book tour to promote it. Gertrude spoke in 37 cities, in 23 states, over a 191-day trip, giving readings (always limited to audiences of five hundred, with a question and answer period at the end. ““Now listen! I’m no fool,” Stein once said in reply to a student’s question about her line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” “I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a . . . is a . . . is a . . .’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years” ).

At sixty, Stein was financially secure, and independent. By telling her story in Alice’s voice, Stein was able to build a striking- and strikingly egomaniacal, to some- monument to her own genius, and on her own terms. Always the center of attention, Stein assumed it, obliquely, through Alice’s eyes, writing- as Alice- “Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many.”

Their last years together were hard. When World War II broke out, they moved to a cottage in the south of France, where collaborationist friends kept them from becoming trophy Jews in the Nazi roundups. Gertrude's book royalties piled up, inaccessible, in America. After the war, her health began to fail, and an unsuccessful cancer surgery in 1946 merely postponed the end for a year.

Stein thought she had provided for Alice in her will, but their relationship had no legal standing whatever. As legally single women, they had few rights on their own, anyway. Women in same-sex relationships in the twentieth century often made their estate plans as exercises in magical thinking. 

Gertrude left her estate to her nephew Allen, whom she disliked, but he was the next living heir. She made provisions for distributions of funds to Alice as needed and, if needed, for the sale of art works to make her life comfortable.

But Allen died before Alice, and his second wife, Roubina, had an eagle’s eye on the art, which, after the war, became both celebrated and extremely valuable. While Allen and Carl van Vechten were named two of three executors, the work fell to the third, the eponymous great-nephew of Edgar Allen Poe.

Poe didn’t care for Alice, or the relationship she’d had with Gertrude, and was parsimonious, at best, with his support.  She supplemented her income with several books, but in the late 1950s was so hard up she surreptitiously sold forty Picasso drawings without telling Poe.

Word got out, and Roubina sued. She waited until Alice was on vacation in 1961, then struck, obtaining a court order allowing her to enter Alice’s apartment and haul all the paintings away to the vaults of the Chase Manhattan Bank. Alice returned to find only their outlines on the walls.

In 1964, the owners of her apartment evicted her for being away too long in the warmer weather of the south of France. Friends supported her over the last few years of her life; she lost her hearing and most of her eyesight and became bedridden. Alice died in 1967, just shy of her ninetieth birthday, and the sixtieth anniversary of meeting Gertrude.

Alice- whose 1963 memoir ended when Gertrude died, was buried beside her at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris. But- at her direction- her name was engraved on the back of the headstone.

In 1997, like many before and since, I left a small stone atop their marker at Pere Lachaise for the fiftieth anniversary of Gertrude’s death.