The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933, 2020 edition) is a newly illustrated edition of the autobiography of Gertrude Stein and her life in Paris. Stein writes as though it is the autobiography of her lover Alice B. Toklas.
Having read this book many years ago, it was a pleasure to re-read it, at a time when I am living right around the corner from the apartment where Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas lived in Paris.
This autobiography tells of Stein before she arrived in Paris, when she arrived in Paris in 1907, the First World War, and after the war. The war years are interesting, when Stein and Toklas volunteered for the American Fund for the French Wounded to help the war effort by driving around France, cranking up the car to get it to start. I’d forgotten how amusing parts of the book were.
It is predominantly though about Stein’s interest in art and artists, books and authors, and her long walks. She thinks Ernest Hemingway was ‘an extraordinarily good-looking’ 23-year-old with a ‘very good instinct for finding apartments in strange but pleasing localities.’ But, giving him advice on his writing, she tells Hemingway to ‘begin again and concentrate.’
Her work was originally criticized by her friends and acquaintances because they didn’t like the way they were mentioned in her book – just as Hemingway was criticized for his 1964 memoir set in Paris, A Moveable Feast.
But who did Stein and Toklas know? Ernest Hemingway, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Sylvia Beach, Guillaume Apollinaire, Isadora Duncan, Ford Madox Ford … EVERYBODY. Their apartment was a social hub for creatives.
The focus of this autobiography is on Stein, through the voice of Alice Toklas. Although, as the book states, ‘don’t be deceived by Alice always in the background. Nothing would have happened without Alice. NO THING.’
Poet T.S. Eliot famously said that ‘the work of Gertrude Stein was very fine but not for us.’ I think the work of Gertrude Stein is very fine and quite the autobiography for us.
I like this style of autobiography: ‘This is a singular story embedded in a singular time.’ It is semi-colloquial, taking a few steps forward, then going back to add another point, then moving forward again. It is interesting for its descriptions, not only of people, but also of the artworks in their apartment, and for its depictions of artists before they were famous.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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