Questions and Answers

As mentioned in the previous two posts, it has been eighty years since GertrudeandAlice returned to the U.S. for Gertrude’s headline-getting lecture tour.

The tour wrapped up in April of 1935 and in that final month,  GertrudeandAlice returned to California. Gertrude had turned her back on the Golden Gate in 1893 and Alice had last trekked the earthquake-rubble strewn hills of San Francisco in 1907.

In a nutshell, here is their April itinerary:

• Arrive in Pasadena, Gertrude lectures at Community Playhouse.
• Party in Beverly Hills. Guests include Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Mary Pickford, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, (Gertrude had requested that he attend, as she was a big fan of his), and Anita Loos, who became a long-time friend of Alice’s.
  

  Anita Loos of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” fame

  

  Chaplin and Goddard

• They rent a car to drive to San Francisco.
• April 8th, arrive in San Francisco, stay at Mark Hopkins Hotel.
• 9th, P.E.N. dinner at Bohemian Club, guest of Gertrude Atherton.
• 10th, “Narration lecture 1,” English Club, Stanford University.
• 11th , “What Is English Literature?” lecture, San Francisco Women’s City Club.
• 12th , “Pictures,” lecture, San Francisco Women’s City Club.
• Meets San Francisco Mayor Angelo J. Rossi and given the key to the city.
• 13th, “Poetry And Grammer” lecture, Mills College.
•  Gertrude visits sites where she lived in Oakland.
• 15th, “Narration lecture 1”, UC Berkeley.
• 17th, “Pictures” lecture, Stanford University.
• 19th, fly to Chicago via Omaha.
• Remainder of the month, spend time with friends in Chicago and New York.
• Leave for Europe on S.S. Champlain May 4th. 

Among their hosts in San Francisco was one of the grande dames of American literature, Gertrude Atherton. This Gertrude was almost twenty years older than G. Stein and had published her first novel in 1888. She continued writing until 1946 with books often set in her native California. I bought a copy of Atherton’s biography a few months ago and right away checked the index to find any references to GertrudeandAlice.

There were several, but the one that excited me the most was in regards to a letter in which G. Stein mentioned that she had received the key to the city in San Francisco. I had uncovered that fact more than twenty years ago in the appendix to the collected letters of Stein and Thornton Wilder, but when I tried to verify the event in the History Center of the San Francisco Public Library, Stein wasn’t listed on a document that supposedly contained all of the city’s key recipients.

Now, I feel confident that she and Alice indeed did receive that key from Mayor Rossi and can only speculate what they did with it or what happened to it.

Where it ended up at the rue de Fleurus was probably determined by its size. If it was small, Alice may have added it to her key ring of household keys, which I envision as one of those large metal rings that a Mother Abbess used to carry around the convent, securing all of the doors to protect the sisters and commodities in her charge!

If it was large, but not larger than a bread box, maybe it was hung on the wall in the six inch space between two Picassos on the right hand wall of the salon, a few paintings over from the Matisses.

As to its whereabouts today, I’ll continue my sleuthing or ,who knows, it may show up on e Bay!

And then, lest we forget, today is Alice’s 138^th birthday! Three weeks ago, an Alice quote and illustration was included in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. Its appearance once again reinforced the ongoing popularity of GetrudeandAlice – not at the level of the daily newspaper stories during the lecture tour, but still very noteworthy.

 

I was curious what other Toklas quotes are highlighted online and came across these four. Of course, three relate to food and the fourth to the love of her life:

 “What is sauce for the goose may be sauce for the gander but is not necessarily sauce for the chicken, the duck, the turkey or the guinea hen.”

  “In the menu, there should be a climax and a culmination. Come to it gently. One will suffice.”

 “The first gatherings of the garden in May of salads, radishes and herbs made me feel like a mother about her baby – how could anything so beautiful be mine. And this emotion of wonder filled me for each vegetable as it was gathered every year. There is nothing that is comparable to it, as satisfactory or as thrilling, as gathering the vegetables one has grown.”

 “This has been a most wonderful evening. Gertrude has said things tonight it will take her 10 years to understand.”

Once again, Happy Birthday cookbook author and literary muse. Enjoy your endless days enjoying your endless harvests and helping Lovey decipher her profoundest of endless thoughts! You both have all the time in the world.

PS

Happy Birthday also to my friend Daniel J. Isengart the subject of The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart by his husband, Filip Noterdaeme. They are the 21st century GertrudeandAlice in my Charmed Circle! Daniel is currently working on his cookbook. (Note Daniel is 93 years younger than Ms. Toklas.)

Tagged Alice B. Toklas, Angelo J. Rossi, Daniel J. Isengart, Filip Noterdaeme, Gertrude Atherton, Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Daniel J. Isengart