Questions and Answers

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published 80 years ago this fall.  What better way to celebrate this anniversary and Alice’s birthday on April 30th (Happy 136 !),  than with another autobiography, but not just any autobiography would do and it hasn’t!

The 1933 Autobiography:
“Bedtime, Pussy?”

Just a few weeks ago THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF DANIEL J. ISENGART by Filip Noterdaeme was published by Outpost19. Honoring the style of Stein’s faux-biography, Noterdaeme writes about his partner and their life together.  They are the new expats, one from Belgium, one from Germany, and their Paris is Brooklyn, New York City, the Hamptons and beyond.

But who are FilipandDaniel, the GertrudeandAlice of the 21^st century, whose book ushers in the 80^th anniversary year of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY?

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It was Tom Hachtman who called to my attention that this year’s Super Bowl was really a Gertrude Stein Super Bowl because it’s her 139^th birthday  on February 3rd. Also this year’s two football teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens, have ties to GertrudeandAlice.

In reality it is either a “GertrudeandAlice vs. Gertrude Super Bowl” as both ladies lived in San Francisco, Gertrude for only a couple of years after leaving the there of Oakland and then spending a few years in Baltimore before heading to Europe.  Or an “Alice vs. Gertrude Super Bowl” if we don’t want to count Gertrude’s few years  in Frisco (sorry!) and give more weight to the Baltimore Steins.  But then, if we factor in the birthday, maybe Alice will forfeit her involvement and allow it to be solely a Gertrude Stein Super Bowl!

“Gimme a 4 !” “4 !” “Gimme a 9 !” “9 !” “Gimme a small e !” “Small e !” Gimme a small r !” “Small r !” (Tom Hachtman, 2013)

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The gift giving holiday season  drew  to a close several weeks ago with Epiphany,  January 6th, the day that according to legend the Magi arrived to give the Christ child their gifts. Two of the regal visitors brought somewhat useless gifts, frankincense and myrrh, and one gift, that small chest of gold, must have come in handy for his young, homeless parents. But come to think of it, all three gifts were far more useful than the 12 lords a-leaping that end that dreadful “Twelve Days of Christmas” dirge!

The Epiphany a la Lego!

Although this year’s holiday “must-have” electronic devices proved to be diverse, from this “I-thing” to that “I-thing,” one of the best-selling, non-I-things, was amazon.com’s Kindle e-reader.

The Kindle I have was handed down to me when an I-Pad entered our household. (The days of hand-me-down itchy sweaters or too short corduroy  pants are long gone!)

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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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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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People often ask me which of Gertrude Stein’s works they should read first.  Sometimes the question comes from someone who knows very little about GertrudeandAlice.  Sometimes it comes from someone who has heard of them and only knows Gertrude through her most famous quotes: “Rose is a…,” or “No there…” and knows Alice because of her cookbook’s most famous recipe the “H–hish Fudge aka ABT Bro-nies.”

Usually I’ve encouraged them to begin with THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS.  The book is very accessible, written in a straight forward narrative style with just enough touches of Gertrude’s stylistic word-play and chronology shuffling to let the reader know that this masterpiece of modernist literature is just that – a masterpiece of modernist literature.

GertrudeandAlice with words (to typeset) in a picture circa 1935

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“And she has and this is it” is the last line of THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALICE B. TOKLAS which was first published seventy-six years ago today.

That sentence ended Gertrude Stein’s first bestseller. The initial printing of 5,400 copies in 1933 was more than 10 times as many copies than her last book, MATISSE PICASSO AND GERTRUDE STEIN, which she and Alice had self-published earlier that year. The Literary Guild book club also featured the book as its September selection with an extensive write-up in its membership brochure. The Guild’s Oprah-like imprimatur also helped sales.

A Man Ray  photograph appeared on the dust jacket of the first edition showing Gertrude at her writing table and Alice entering the room, but no where on the dust jacket  or cover page of the book is the author’s name.  And on the back page of the dust jacket, the publisher continues the literary joke by stating:

dust jacket of the 1933 U.S. first edition

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“The envelope please. The Oscar for best actress in a supporting role goes to …”

Just imagine that in that great  movie year 1939 – the year of   “Gone with the Wind,” The Wizard of Oz,” “Stagecoach,” “Ninotchka,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and “Wuthering Heights”- GertrudeandAlice had starred in a movie version of  THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY  OF ALICE B. TOKLAS and the double feature at the local Bijou one-screenplex would have been Gertrude’s children’s book THE WORLD IS ROUND produced by Walt Disney!

Well, it could have happened, though it didn’t. Studio politics and World War II probably side-tracked plans.

After the success of the Autobiography, GertrudeandAlice visited Hollywood in the spring of 1935 as part of their six month criss-cross lecture tour of America. They were guests at a star-filled dinner party in Beverly Hills and Gertrude had a lively discussion about film with Charlie Chaplin who was seated next to her.

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