The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Stein and Toklas saw their previously ardent set of prewar friends, such as Matisse and Picasso, disperse. Matisse had moved to Nice, and Stein and Picasso were more distant, although she did go to stay with him at Antibes on the Côte d’Azur.

Stein struggled to gain recognition for her literary output and to get her work in publications such as the Atlantic Monthly. Still, she was prolific and took up the eccentric habit of writing in the car; she would take in the sound and movement of the streets and then think of a sentence “as a sort of tuning fork and metronome and then [writing] to that time and tune” (175).

They met new people, including the American expat Sylvia Beach, who would establish the famous Shakespeare and Company English-language bookshop on Paris’s Left Bank in 1951. Representatives from each new artistic movement were guests at their house. They included Dadaism founder Tristan Tzara, who first appeared in Paris, and the photographer Man Ray, who took pictures of Stein and other famous people. While they befriended American poet Ezra Pound, Stein disliked him. She called him the dull village explainer and he took offense, ending their intimacy. While Stein and T. S. Eliot conversed about the techniques of poetry, he demurred about publishing her work in the Criterion. Toklas and Eliot’s secretary took up correspondence, addressing each other as “Sir” although they were both female. Nothing came of this exchange, although Stein transmuted it into a mischievous anecdote.

Stein and Toklas purchased a country house in the Rhône Valley, and it was here that Stein wrote Elucidation (1927), a meditation on her problems of expression and a treatise about her writing style. Later, Toklas printed Stein’s treatises on grammar, sentences, and paragraphs under the title How to Write. When the Spanish painter Juan Gris died, his former companion Picasso joined Stein for a day of mourning. Stein published a tribute titled “The Life and Death of Juan Gris” (1927), which Toklas believed was the most moving thing she ever wrote.

During this time, Stein and Toklas met a plethora of young men who all appeared to be 26 years of age. Among these was Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway and Stein became fast friends, but Toklas was always less certain of his writing and his character. Stein advised Hemingway that his work was overly descriptive and encouraged him to begin again and concentrate. She also advised him to give up newspaper work, otherwise “you will never see things, you will only see words and that will not do […] if you intend to be a writer” (181). When Hemingway’s wife became pregnant, he decided that the best course of action would be to earn money in America for a year and then return to Paris with the baby. When they returned to Paris, Toklas and Stein were the baby’s godmothers. Toklas observed that writer godparents are not the most stable, as the relationship between them and the parents almost always cools. Still, Toklas especially was a devoted godmother for a while. Hemingway wanted a sample of Stein’s work, The Making of Americans, for the Transatlantic Review. Meanwhile, Toklas shared her passion for Spanish culture and bullfighting with Hemingway. Hemingway’s career took off, to the extent that Stein accused him of eliminating his rivals. Also at this time, Stein met F. Scott Fitzgerald. She credited him with being the only one of his generation who wrote naturally in sentences. She thought his works This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925) set the tone of the new era.

Meanwhile, Stein published her thousand-page tome The Making of Americans (1925), in which the sentences started off long and only got longer as the work continued. A few years later, Stein and Georges Hugnet worked on the French translation of the work. Stein’s work found favor in England with British poet and critic Edith Sitwell, and she was featured in French Vogue. Sitwell insisted that Stein speak at Oxford and Cambridge, where earnest young men asked questions about her work. Toklas, for her part, campaigned to get Stein’s writings, including operas and plays, published.

Carl Van Vechten came to Paris and sent some prominent African Americans to Stein and Toklas’s house. The singer and actor Paul Robeson interested Stein for his ability to look critically at American values and life. However, Stein was racist and condescending, opining that Robeson “became definitely a negro” as soon as any white person came into the room, and telling him he was wrong to sing spirituals as “they do not belong to you any more than anything else” (201). Stein’s view was that people of African origin suffered less from discrimination than from “nothingness” in being from a continent with an ancient but static culture where nothing ever changed (202).

In the coda to the autobiography, Toklas wryly jokes that she is such a good wifely accomplice to Stein’s life that she has no time to be an author of her own life. That is where Stein steps in to write the autobiography, in the style of Daniel Defoe for Robinson Crusoe.