Questions and Answers

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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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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As a collector of all things GertrudeandAlice, at one point I decided to find things pertaining to roses because of Gertrude Stein’s most famous line. Some of these items have been added to my collection. Often collectors need to scour shops, flea markets and e-bay to find that rare item that will make their collection complete, but in the case of rose influenced “stuff”, there is so much there there, not much serious scouring is needed.

Here are a few of the things I’ve come across. Those in my collection are marked with an asterick (*).

• A watch for those who not only want to know what time it is, but also want the scent of the White House rose garden encircling their wrist:

Rose-scented SWATCH, 1998 *

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From time to time, I’ll be posting GertrudeandAlice related events.  Here’s one coming up in a few weeks in New York City with details from their press release and my photo contributions. If you’re in New York, check it out or plan that Big Apple getaway to see it.

*****

NOW REPEAT IN STEINESE

Four Gertrude Stein productions with four glasses of wine

A Winestein…it’s for real!

EVERY TUESDAY IN JUNE AT 7:30PM
(June 1, 8, 15, 22 and 29)

AT UNDER ST. MARKS THEATER IN THE EAST VILLAGE

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OK, I celebrated Gertrude’s birthday with a post in February and mine in March with a post, so now here’s to Alice B. Toklas who was born today in 1877!

As she wrote at the beginning of  her memoir WHAT IS REMEMBERED:

“I was born and raised in California, where my maternal grandfather had been a pioneer before the state was admitted to the Union.  He had bought a gold mine and settled in Jackson, Amador County.  A few years later he crossed the Isthmus of Panama again and went to Brooklyn, where he married my grandmother.  There my mother was born.  When she was three years old, they went to Jackson.”

And then there’s Gertrudes’s take on Alice’s beginnings in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS:

“I was born in San Francisco, California.  I have in consequence always preferred living in a temperate climate but it is difficult, on the continent of Europe or even in America, to find a temperate climate and live in it.  My mother’s father was a pioneer, he came to California in ’49, he married my grandmother who was very fond of music.  She was a pupil of Clara Schumann’s father.  My mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie.”

Alice B. , circa 1878

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Last summer when I told one of my friends, who is also a big GertrudeandAlice fan, that I was going to write a blog devoted to them, his first response was that he hoped I’d be writing about things that hadn’t been written about and that I wouldn’t write silly things making fun of them.

I did mention the chickens in England  named Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein in an earlier post about items I’d received through my GoogleAlert.  I guess that was silly. Sorry.

But now to some  items about GertrudeandAlice that, though factual, could fall into the “Believe It or Not!” category.  Some are the kind of tidbits that scholars love to unearth or reference to indicate that they are really in the know and that they’ve scoured those boxes in the lower basements of research libraries.  For fans like me, they are like the shiny nuggets among the pebbles in a gold miner’s pan and almost as exciting as finding a previously unseen photograph of GertrudeandAlice tucked away in the pages of a rare book.

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“My Mesdames began preparing for it months in advance. They placed orders for new dresses, gloves and shoes. Nothing was extravagant, but everything was luxurious, waistcoats embroidered with flowers and several kinds of birds, traveling outfits in handsome tweeds with brown velvet trims and buttons, shoes identical except for the heels and the size.”

– THE BOOK OF SALT (2003) by Monique Truong

Seventy-five years ago today, GertrudeandAlice arrived in San Francisco as part of their 1934-35 U.S. lecture tour.  They drove from Los Angeles in a rental car. (Gertrude had been introduced to the concept of car rentals on a Chicago stop and was fascinated by it.)

Gertrude had not been in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than forty years and Alice returned after leaving for Paris in 1907.

For eleven days they were regaled by the City staying at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill and spending the days at luncheons and lectures and visiting some of the places they had known many of which had changed since the 1906 fire and earthquake.

Top of the Mark, San Francisco circa 1930s

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“Alphabets and names make games and everybody has a name and all the same they have in a way to have a birthday.

The thing to do is to think of names.

Names will do.

Mildew.

And you have to think of alphabets too, without an alphabet well without names where are you, and birthdays are very favorable too, otherwise who are you.”

So begins Gertrude Stein’s book TO DO: A BOOK OF ALPHABETS AND BIRTHDAYS published by Yale University Press in 1957  as part of the book ALPHABETS AND BIRTHDAYS.  (The book was actually finished in 1940 and was to be a sequel to her children’s book THE WORLD IS ROUND. The manuscript was shuffled from publisher to publisher and  since there were problems completing illustrations for it and “manufacturing difficulties” prompted by WWII, it was not published until it became a part of the 1950’s Yale series.)

I’ve quoted it here as today is my birthday, the first I’ve celebrated since beginning this blog.

a young HG in vest and tie

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