came back quite promptly and with very polite handwriting and sometimes regretful refusals… You can understand how much I appreciate your letter.
But their friendship did not survive. The end was, Mabel felt sure, Alice’s doing:
Alice’s final and successful effort in turning Gertrude from me – her influencing and her wish and I missed my jolly fat friend very much.
monogamy
With 27 rue de Fleurus to themselves, Gertrude and Alice had a covered hallway built between the studio and living area, the cast-iron stove taken from the studio and a fireplace installed, gas lamps removed and the place wired for electricity, and rooms repapered and redecorated.
From their first meeting on, they were never apart for more than a few hours. They never travelled independently, or had separate friends. To escape Paris in the summer months, they rented a large house in the village of Bilignin, near Belley, east of Lyons. The poet Bravig Imbs, who visited them there, described a night when Gertrude took him to see the ancient landscape high up near Saint Germain les Paroisses. There were poplar trees and a ruined tower and the valley was suffused with moonlight. ‘We must be getting back to Alice,’ Gertrude said. ‘If I’m away from her for long I get low in my mind.’
Alice, on meeting Gertrude, had arrived at her destination. Gertrude liked to write, talk to people, walk Basket the dog, drive the car, look at paintings and meditate about life and art. Alice did the rest. She was secretary, cook, agent and housekeeper. When they went on holiday, which was often, Alice did the packing. And she supervised the cooking: ‘In the menu there should be a climax and a culmination’, she wrote. ‘Come to it gently. One will suffice.’ Throughout her life she collected recipes: Polish dumplings made with sour cream, cottage cheese, butter, eggs and flour; hardboiled eggs served with whipped cream truffles and Madeira wine; hare cooked in dry champagne, cognac, fat salt pork, truffles, cream and butter; omelettes with six eggs, chicken livers and cognac; bananas flamed in kirsch; chocolate whip made of eggs, bitter chocolate, icing sugar, cream and cognac.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at home in the rue de Fleurus © Fotosearch / Stringer / Getty Images
‘She is very necessary to me. My sweetie. She is all to me,’ wrote Gertrude, who was freed from all chores and could concentrate on being a genius. Gertrude said Alice was always ‘forethoughtful, which is what is pleasant for me’. Others besides Leo and Mabel Dodge suffered the strength of Alice’s claim. Mabel Weeks, Gertrude’s friend from their student days, wrote to Gertrude of their correspondence: ‘Don’t read this to Alice. Unless I feel that sometimes I can write just to you it’s no fun to write.’
Visitors commented on Gertrude’s sense of repose. Alice had none. She got up at six in Bilignin to pick wild strawberries for Gertrude’s breakfast, and in Paris to do cleaning because she did not trust hired staff. She said she could contemplate violence towards a maid who broke anything and her relationships were bad with a succession of cooks and maids.
Gertrude did not resist being infantilized. She lived in the cocoon of her own intelligence and meandering imagination. ‘It’s hard work being a genius’, she said. ‘You have to sit around so much doing nothing.’ Alice nicknamed her Baby as well as Lovey.
love letters for Alice
They wrote notes to each other, inscribed DD and YD (Darling Darling and Your Darling). ‘Our pleasure is to do every day the work of that day’, Gertrude wrote, ‘to cut our hair and not want blue eyes, to be reasonable and obedient. To obey and not split hairs.’
She penned her love for Alice in a piece called Bonne Année:
I marvel at my baby I marvel at her beauty I marvel at her perfection I marvel at her purity I marvel at her tenderness. I marvel at her charm I marvel at her vanity I marvel at her industry I marvel at her humor I marvel at her intelligence I marvel at her rapidity I marvel at her brilliance I marvel at her sweetness I marvel at her delicacy, I marvel at her generosity, I marvel at her cow.
Cows, Steinian scholars advise, are orgasms. Gertrude, in her bedroom pieces, made many a reference to them. She described her piece A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has A Cow: A Love Story as her Tristan and Isolde:
Having it as having having it as happening, happening to have it as happening. Happening and have it as happening and having to have it happen as happening, and my wife has a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now, my wife having a cow as now and having a cow as now and having a cow and having a cow now, my wife has a cow and now. My wife has a cow.
They took holidays in Italy and Spain. Alice particularly liked Ávila. Her Spanish look was a long black dress, black gloves and a feather hat with flowers. Neither of them ever wore trousers. Gertrude’s sartorial choice for summer was ecumenical and on one occasion she was mistaken for a bishop.
the history of anything
After writing the history of everyone in The Making of Americans and the history of anyone in her portraits, in Tender Buttons Gertrude wanted to write the history of anything. She gave as her objective the need ‘to completely face the difficulty of how to include what is seen with hearing and listening’. Tender Buttons was her ‘first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound and sense and eliminating rhythm’. She was:
trying to live in looking and not mix it up with remembering and to reduce to its minimum listening and talking and to include colour and movement:
ORANGE
A type oh oh new new not knealer knealer of
