At the age of fifty-two, Gertrude was a well-known literary figure but with a dismal publishing record and viewed by many to be unreadable. She was a modernist, an innovator, though few seemed quite sure what she was on about. She did not buy the copies from McAlmon, nor did he pulp them. The book’s reputation grew. But Gertrude and McAlmon were through with each other and theirs became another relationship beyond repair.
In 1931, Edmund Wilson published Axel’s Castle, critical essays subtitled ‘A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930’. In it, he put Gertrude in the same company as acknowledged great modernists: Proust, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Paul Valéry – all men, of course. She was the only woman included. Wilson wrote that although Gertrude wrote nonsense,
One should not talk about ‘nonsense’ until one has decided what sense consists of… Most of us balk at her soporific rigmaroles, her echolalic incantations, her half-witted sounding catalogues of numbers. Most of us read her less and less. Yet… we are still always aware of her presence in the background of contemporary literature. And whenever we pick up her writings, however unintelligible we may find them, we are aware of a literary personality of unmistakeable originality and distinction.
The Autobiography of Alice. B. Toklas
In person, Gertrude was commonsensical and wise. She was respected, sought after, quoted, interviewed and lampooned, but except for contributions to the short-lived literary magazines she was seldom published. The world knew of Gertrude Stein but less than a few read her and appreciated her for the genius she considered herself to be. Alice did not swerve from doing all she could to promote her, but she let her know she would like her to be rich and successful in a popular way. The reputations of many of the young men whose careers Gertrude had helped forge were secured. Alice urged her to write a memoir. She felt sure it would be a financial success. Gertrude feared compromising her art. ‘Remarks are not literature,’ she said. She suggested Alice write her memoirs and call them My Life with the Great, or My Twenty Five Years with Gertrude Stein. Alice responded that she did everything else but could not be an author too.
So Gertrude, prompted by Alice, in the autumn of 1932 wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It took her six weeks. Familiarity with their merged personalities was all too real. Gertrude knew Alice through and through, and with the alter ego device Alice could be responsible for snide remarks and equivocal opinions about friends and contemporaries.
The Autobiography was a light-hearted mix of fact, fiction, opinion, insult and anecdote. The American publisher Harcourt Brace snapped it up. Atlantic Monthly serialized it. The opening section ‘Before I came to Paris’ established Alice’s character: ‘a gently bred’ intelligent young Californian woman, a moderately contented housekeeper for her father and brother, for whom life was reasonably full: ‘I enjoyed it but I was not very ardent in it.’
Then came the San Francisco earthquake, an apocalyptic event equalled only by its sequel: Alice travelled to Paris and met Gertrude Stein. Gertrude was at the centre of ‘the heroic age of cubism’. She familiarized Alice with the world of modern art, took her to the cutting-edge art shows, introduced her to everyone of consequence and allowed her to serve the person at the vanguard of modern taste, modern literature and American cultural identity.
The narrative moved quickly to the main subject of concern – Gertrude. ‘In English literature in her time she is the only one. She has always known it and now she says it.’ Gertrude was good-humoured, unpretentious, well-educated, widely travelled and there was only one language for her: English. She did not like the theatre, she could not draw and ‘Gertrude Stein never had subconscious reactions’. She was an ordinary, middle-class American woman, educated in Massachusetts and Maryland, who just happened to be a genius.
The Autobiography, with Gertrude and Alice at its centre, chronicled a quarter of a century of Paris life. Picasso, Matisse, Apollinaire, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald were there, so was the cook Hélène, Mabel Weeks, Basket the dog and Auntie the car. It covered the revolutionary exhibitions of the Fauves and Cubists, the struggles of the little magazines in the twenties, the aspirations of the expatriate writers after the 1914–18 war. And because six years after its publication Europe was wrecked by a war that ended a civilization, it came to be seen as an exemplar, a model of its kind. Nowhere was the word lesbian used. Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Janet Flanner, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, Natalie Barney made guest appearances but not as women who loved women. Nor were Gertrude and Alice lesbian partners. They were indivisible, a unique entity.
Reviews were good. Edmund Wilson in the New Republic praised the book’s wisdom, distinction and charm and said it showed Gertrude’s influence at the source of modern literature and art. Cyril Connolly in the Sunday Times called it a model of its kind that stood up to any amount of rereading. And Janet Flanner, Genêt, in her ‘Letter from Paris’ called it:
a complete memoir of that exciting period when Cubism was being invented in paint and a new manner of writing being patented in words, an epoch when not everyone had too much to eat but everyone had lots to say, when everything we now breathe was already in the air and only a few had the nose for news to smell it – and with most of the odors of discovery right under the Toklas-Stein roof.
She said the book was simply written ‘in Miss St- that is to say, Miss Toklas’s first, or easiest literary manner’.
The book was reprinted four times in four years. Bernard Faÿ translated the French edition published by Gallimard, Cesare Pavese the Italian edition. Here for Gertrude, at the age of sixty, was popular success.
Many of those
