Questions and Answers

As another year ends, I, as many of you, will exclaim “Another year? What a year!”

All years have their ups and downs and this one was no different.

Events on the world stage were as crazy and heart-breaking as ever .  And I often wonder as years like 1929 or 1941 or  1962 came to a end, whether the despair of events of those years overwhelmed the joys that must also have entered people’s lives.

Two major links to GertrudeandAlice left us this year: Julian Stein, Jr. and Robert Lescher.

Those of you who have been following my posts have been introduced to Julian, Gertrude’s cousin, through the excerpts that I’ve featured from his memoirs.  (There are more to follow in the new year, I promise.) Julian will be remembered for a long, long time by all of those who knew and loved him.

The unforgettable Julian Stein, Jr.

Robert Lescher was a major figure in the New York publishing scene for 60 years working with such writers as Robert Frost, MFK Fisher and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Literary mentor Robert Lescher

He traveled to Paris in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s to work with Alice on writing her memoir, WHAT IS REMEMBERED.

Alice had begun work on the book with Max White, whom Gertrude had praised as one of America’s young, up-and-coming writers in the late 1940s. For a number of months he met with Alice at rue Christine, taking notes as she related her life with Gertrude to him.

Portrait of Max White by Alice Neel

However, at one point he stormed out of a visit , notes in hand since , as he later put it, he did not believe Alice was telling him the truth and he wanted nothing to do with such a book.  He destroyed the notes and it was up to Robert Lescher to again begin the process as her publisher eagerly awaited the manuscript. The book was finally published in 1963.  I had a chance to meet with him twice in NYC and enjoyed his recollections of time with Alice.

So, as we all wrap up the last week of 2012 and gird ourselves for the ups and downs of 2013, my card to all of you this year features you know who,  with four-legged you know who the second and a few collaged items to make it all festive!  In her lap, Alice proudly displays her fruitcake which was one of the things that she relished making at the end of WWII.  The recipe is in her cookbook and ends with preparing icing  though she insists that that is “gilding the lily!”

With all good wishes to all….

HRG

One hundred and six years ago yesterday, San Francisco burned following the jolt of the 1906 Fire and Earthquake.

Gertrude Stein had been living in Paris for three years at the time of the quake, but Alice B. Toklas was in San Francisco living with her father on Clay Street.

The house on Clay Street.

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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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