Questions and Answers

One of the benefits of a blog is that it can be timely and even though a few posts ago I had listed upcoming things that I’d planned to write about, my recent trip to Japan got in the way.  (I began the draft of this post in our hotel in Kyoto, two days before our return, though I  verified a few facts in books I have at home before I published this.)

Leo Stein in a rakish pose

Just for fun while in Kyoto, I decided to do a Google search for “Leo Stein Japanese prints,” as I knew that Leo had an interest in this type of art.  These prints had come to the attention of Westerners as they were used to wrap Japanese porcelain which became very popular following the opening of the country in the 1860’s.  This art form also influenced the subject matter and composition of the Post-impressionists’ paintings.

Japanese print circa 1895. Is it a rose?

To my surprise (why am I still surprised at what turns up on the Internet – must be the fact I haven’t graduated to texting and tweeting and am still an old-school e mail writer!) an item appeared that is in the Stein collection at Yale – a note Leo wrote to Gertrude from Kyoto in December, 1895, giving her his address written in Japanese!

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Today is the first anniversary of the death of our Springer Spaniel, Ollie.  Though one year has passed, whenever we remember him our eyes still get misty, especially as we recall his last week with us.

We miss his talking, his grin when he greeted us when we came home, his love of his special diet of broccoli, sardines, tofu, and boiled potatoes and his eager anticipation at his window in the living room as he waited to be picked up each day by his walker to join his play group! A lot of  ‘his’ as part of  ‘ours.’

And so today we remember and are also thankful for his great-nephew Fritz who in a few weeks will be one-year old and has already started his list of joys and memories in our life.

Ollie posing during a Christmas past.

And as Gertrude or Alice should, as much as possible, have the last word or words in each post on this blog, I turn it over to Gertrude Stein once again this time from her work “Identity a Poem:”

I am I because my little dog knows me. The figure wanders on alone.
The little dog does not appear because if it did then there would be nothing to fear.
It is not known that anybody who is anybody is not alone and if alone then how can the dog be there and if the little dog is not there is it alone.
The little dog is not alone because no little dog could be alone. If it were alone it would not be there.
So then the play has to be like this.
The person and the dog are there and the dog is there and the person is there and where oh where is their identity, is the identity there anywhere.
I say two dogs but say a dog and a dog.

Last week was the beginning of fall (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) or by its more sophisticated sounding name “autumn.”  Fall used to mean that a new school year was beginning, new television programs were about to start or old, successful ones entered a new season, and the end-of-the year holidays would be here again. (My Jewish friends have already begun the rounds of holidays as Rosh Hashanah,Yom Kippur  have just passed and Sukkot is now finishing up.)

But now as I am no longer a student or teacher (in the formal sense), the school calendar means little. Television seasons now begin whenever a rating boast is needed or shows need to replace programs whose ratings are just too low to get sufficient sponsorship from ED or acid reflux pill manufacturers.  As for the Holidays—Thanksgiving is fine as it’s all about eating and sharing food, while the gift-giving ones are a pain, and don’t even ask me about my feelings about New Year’s Eve–ugh!

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Today, one hundred years ago, the moving van arrived at 27, rue de Fleurus and Alice B. Toklas’s belongings were unloaded and she moved in with Gertrude Stein!  They had first met almost three years before to the day.  Since that meeting, coming to ’27’ on a daily basis became a part of Alice’s routine and though she had undoubtedly begun to assume some household responsibilities during that period, she had most notably become the primary typist of Gertrude’s manuscripts.

A picture postcard of Paris, 1910.

Alice had been living in an apartment on rue Notre Dames des Champs within walking distance of rue de Fleurus with her San Francisco neighbor Harriet Levy.  When Harriet decided to return to San Francisco, she asked Alice to handle shipping her furniture and paintings including a Matisse.

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For those of you who have been following the adventures of the birth and arrival of my English Springer Spaniel Fritz since last November, I  thought a short post would be appropriate as he passes the nine month old mark.

After his bath this past weekend, he surprised me with a most regal pose on one of our new sofas with its rose cushion, so how could I not feature him this week?!

By chance I also received an e mail and photo from a friend who had spent her vacation in a home on Lake Tahoe.  On the wall of one of the rooms was a framed California license plate with “Mr Fritz” on it.  She thought of me and thought of Fritz.

And then there was another dog who often posed regally both for photographs and portraits and thoroughly enjoyed the attention:

“Basket was a white poodle.  When I first came to Paris everybody every concierge had a poodle as they later had a fox terrier, then Alsatian police dogs came and then wire haired terriers and then we had a white poodle and we named him Basket.  The French children and the French men and women would all stop and look at him, they said each one as if it was a new idea one would think he was a lamb.

One day, Basket had just had just been washed, a little boy came along and said, one would call it a marriage he is so white…”

from EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Gertrude Stein

Mr. Fritz and Baskets I & II holding court in special places in everybody’s autobiography.

Seventy-three years ago tomorrow, an obituary appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. But first:

All families, I assume, have skeletons in their closets. Often these bones are fleshed out by  stories that have become embellished over the years of a relative who did this or that and forever became the black sheep of the family – as if  most families are all lambs from a  pure, white flock!

Biographers of well-known people relish unearthing these skeletons to get all the facts that are (usually) fit to print. This juicy information helps to sell books as reviewers often highlight these tidbits. (The recent Kitty Kelley biography of Oprah comes to mind.)

The Armoire, 1778

In the case of GertrudeandAlice, there were skeletons in their closets and I don’t mean the fact that they were lesbians and never really “came-out” of the armoire.  (Their close friends knew the score and many of Gertrude’s writings give plenty of hints about the relationship between her and her “secretary/companion.”)

Gertrude had three brothers and a sister, but one usually only hears about two of the brothers, Michael, the eldest and  Leo, who was two years older than she was.  Michael had been responsible for selling the family’s share in the street car business in San Francisco after their father’s death, giving the Steins enough money to live comfortably for almost fifty years.  And both Michael and Leo along with Gertrude were responsible for amassing the famous Stein family collection of major artists of the early 20th century.

The Steins circa 1881:( l to rt) Simon, Gertrude, Father,Michael,Mother,Leo and Bertha

It was the two other siblings, Bertha and Simon, who have been relegated to skeletons-in-the-closet status, though as far as I know neither did anything horrendous including bad-mouthing any of their more well-known kin, so maybe it would be fairer to call them “tibias or fibulas in the closet.”

Maybe Gertrude should take the heat for estranging this sister and brother. She referred to both of them as “simple-minded” in her book EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY – not exactly the kind of sentiment that brings families together.  Simon did have a simple life, first working as a brakeman on the San Francisco cable cars (he had to retire from that job when he gained too much weight and later ran the stationery and cigar concession in an Italian grocery store. Bertha lived in Baltimore, married, raised a family and had no contact with her brothers and sister. Gertrude,however, wrote word portraits of two of her sons, Daniel and Arthur.

Simon may have put the brakes on along this route on San Francisco's Castro Street

But then we come to Alice.

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The newest edition of THE ALICE B. TOKLAS COOK BOOK (Harper Perennial, 2010) came out yesterday published by the paperback division of its original 1954  publisher then called Harper & Sons. (The title of the book maintains the original spelling of “cookbook” as two words.)  This book is a reprint of the original, but  includes a foreword written by food writer M.F.K. Fisher for the thirtieth anniversary edition.  Fisher regrets that she never met Alice, though she had several chances while living in Paris.

By the end of the first week that this edition was released, it was within the top fifty French cookbooks on amazon.com.  Not bad!

In the fifty six years since it first came out, the cookbook has only been out of print for a very short time and has been widely translated, most recently into Norwegian and became a bestseller in Scandinavia.

The continuing popularity of the cookbook is largely due to the  “Haschish Fudge” recipe, page 259 of the latest edition, which though really more of a spicy, nut candy than a fudge, morphed into  “Alice B. Toklas Brownies” in the 1960s.  (See Ruth Reichl note below.) The cookbook is, however, more than just this notorious recipe, and the story of how it came about and has endured all of these years is in itself blogworthy.

The latest edition with a cover blurb by friend Janet Flanner.

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Not long ago I was moaning to a friend that the summer has been extremely busy filled with lots of travel, an office move and staff offsite, a trip to the South for a friend’s wedding and on and on.  I ended with the wish for the now prized three months of summer vacation most of us enjoyed during our halcyon school days.  I guess that time can return again if and when I choose to retire, a concept which in reality is as outdated as FDR’s Social Security Administration which was to provide for those golden years.

"Roll out those lazy, crazy, hazy days of summer..."

For GertrudeandAlice getting away from Paris for the summer either to a European destination or their rented home near the French-Swiss border was a major part of their annual calendar.  Just for fun I imagined a group letter (with photos) from them to their friends highlighting a few of the events of the first weeks of summer. (Once the summer is over they can officially write that ubiquitous school essay “How I Spent My Summer Vacation!”)

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Among GertrudeandAlice’s biggest fans were the World War I doughboys and the GIs of WWII. During the “War-To-End-All-Wars”[WTEAW] the Ladies drove around France delivering supplies to the American and French troops and were given an award after the war by the French government for their service and valor.

GertrudeandAlice circa World War I

On the road to help the doughboys.

They stayed in touch with many of the doughboys including W.G. Rogers, the “Kiddie,” who wrote the first biography of Gertrude, WHEN THIS YOU SEE REMEMBER ME: GERTRUDE STEIN IN PERSON, published in 1948 two years after her death. (A few weeks ago I received an e mail from the son of one of the other doughboys they befriended named Duncan who is mentioned in both THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS and EVERYBODY’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. They visited Duncan in 1935 during the U.S. lecture tour.  All of this will be a future post.)

At the end of the war that began 21 years after the WTEAW (so much for fighting wars to end wars), GertudeandAlice were liberated in Vichy France by GIs.  From then on,  a steady stream of them came to visit in Paris.  Rogers refers to these visitors in the last few pages of his book:

“Over many people Miss Stein cast a sort of spell, and what had happened in America in the strictly formal atmosphere surrounding the visiting celebrity [during the U.S. lecture tour] must have happened many more times in Paris.  To the one Kiddie of World War I were now added a hundred and a thousand more.  It wasn’t a following she had, but a court.  One man introduced a friend, who introduced a friend, who introduced a friend.  It was a chain process.  It was the old days at the rue de Fleurus over again…”

The conversations that GertrudeandAlice had with the GIs and the stories they told became Gertrude’s last book published during her lifetime, the novella BREWSIE AND WILLIE.

GertrudeandAlice with some Brewsies and Willies, 1945

Gertrude chowing down with the 101st Division, Germany 1945

The World Premiere of a play based on BREWSIE AND WILLIE opens in Los Angeles this week.

Here is complete information from the production’s news release:

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One year ago today I began this blog and have in those twelve months written 16,394 words – not quite a novel’s worth of words, but  a good start even though Gertrude Stein’s major opus THE MAKING OF AMERICANS contains 517,207 words.

"Gertrude and Alice," hand-in-hand for the blog anniversary by Bruce Kellner, 1982

Over the years I have seen many attempts to copy Stein’s writing whether as an exercise in a creative writing class, as a spoof ( something that has been done ever since her first writings appeared more than 100 years ago), or as an acknowledgement of the power of her creative use of words. As a tribute to her and the power  words, I have taken the first two words and last two words of each blog to create the following Steinian piece:

***

BLOG LOG, LOG BLOG

One of to follow

When I the morning

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