Gertrude and Alice Reconsidered

January 4, 2014

     After yesterday's sad news regarding Philip Seymour Hoffmann, delving into the past via Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm's 2007 consideration of the elusive Gertrude Stein and her partner Alice B. Toklas, was a welcome distraction.  This "odd couple" --Stein the self-proclaimed literary genius, Toklas her handmaiden, were two Jewish women who lived out the German occupation of France there.  "How?" is the question Malcolm raises.

       For some of the baby boomer generation, Alice's name conjures up dim memories of Peter Sellers' 1968 movie, "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas", a box office bomb  (17% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer poll) about what was then called "the counterculture".   Indeed, Alice and Gertrude were icons of the counterculture, Gertrude a writer who reads like an an acrostic, Alice author of a fantastical cookbook with a recipe that calls for using a hypodermic syringe to inject orange juice into a marinating leg of lamb.

       A lot of English literature students in the 60s and 70s carried around with them The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein's only bestseller, written in standard English and not an autobiography at all, but Stein's projection of her life with Alice.  The book was successful enough for Stein to be invited to lecture about it in America, which she did, Toklas taking care of all the practical arrangements, as she always did.

       When the Second World War broke out, Stein and Toklas refused to emigrate to neutral Switzerland and instead, moved to Culoz, a small village in the Ain département near its border with French Savoy and the Swiss border.  There, Stein and Toklas sat out the war.

         I wonder whether Stein's countercultural followers would have been quite as enthusiastic about her and her work had they known Stein was a conservative Republican and detested Franklin Delano Roosevelt; or that the reason she and Alice were unmolested in France was because of their friendship with a man with the last name of Faÿ, a collaborator and anti-Semite directly responsible for the deaths of numerous Freemasons, whom he was charged with identifying and persecuting.  As a devoted admirer of Stein, Faÿ lobbied Petain to protect the stocky genius and her devoted lover.  At the war's end, after Faÿ was imprisoned for war crimes, Stein and Toklas advocated for his release and even contributed funds that enabled him to make his escape from the prison into Switzerland.  His closeness to Vichy never troubled them --neither woman ever identified herself --in conversation or writing-- as Jewish.  They preferred, it seems, to think of themselves, individually, and as a couple, as somehow separate and apart from the class of people being exterminated in the camps.

         I see Stein not as an avatar of literary modernism, but a pompous blowhard, an egomaniac whose money allowed her to indulge her fantasies of literary brilliance.  This is a minority view in English Departments in the United States, although Stein is not taken up with the passion her most ardent admirers in the academy --three Stein scholars who meet with Malcolm in the course of her preparation of Gertrude and Alice-- think she deserves.  They largely blame this on Leon Katz, a professor of dramaturgy at Yale who wrote a dissertation about Stein, but never published the book he planned to write based on his in-depth interviews with Toklas after Stein's death immediately after the war.  (Toklas outlived Stein for two decades.)   

          Nonetheless, Katz' doctoral dissertation about what he learned from Toklas about life with Stein,  throws a different light on the relationship Toklas spent her life after Stein's death mythologizing .  But if you're interested, it is unnecessary to find Katz' thesis to distill the tidbits Katz unearthed: With Al Carmines, Katz wrote an opera about the two women, The Making Of Americans, that steals its title from Stein and doesn't stint the details.

          Yet disclosure of the physical aspects of the conjugal life of the two women isn't half as amusing as the revelation that Toklas wasn't the pushover she played in public.  In private, the two women engaged in sado-masochistic games; in front of their intimates, they fought like cats and dogs.  So much for the connubial bliss of the literary trailblazer and her amanuensis.

          Funnier though, is the revelation that Alice forced Gertrude to break off her friendship with Ernest Hemingway because --as Donald Sutherland, an intimate, wrote-- Alice was jealous of Hemingway's lust for the corpulent Gertrude:

          I had heard that Hemingway had not infrequently said in conversation and once at least in a letter --that he had always wanted to lay her--

          --A desire to which Sutherland, too, admits.

         Who knew?

          At her death, Stein left Toklas only a life estate in her most valuable property, the modernist art by Cezanne, Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse and others.  (The contents of their house in Paris, excepting the art, were looted by the Nazis.)  The residuary estate was to go to the children of her brother Michael, to whom she was not close.  (She became estranged from her brother Leo, to whom she had been closest --and with whom she began collecting-- when he failed to recognize her genius; and he, on his part,  failed to develop his own.)

          As a result of Stein's desire to see her property stay in the Stein family, Toklas spent her life after Stein's death in penury.  And when she sold a few works on paper to pay bills, Michael's second wife, Roubina, contrived a suit to have the paintings taken away from Toklas before the old woman could despoil the estate.  Arthritic and bedridden, accustomed to the best, Toklas was evicted from the home she had shared with Stein on rue de Christine and moved to a less dignified apartment on rue de la Convention.  It was only thanks to Janet Flanner, Virgil Thomson and Doda Conrad --who raised funds for her care from friends of the couple and administered them for Toklas--that she avoided complete destitution.

         Toklas died on March 6, 1987, aged 89, never aware that the careful façade of "life with a genius" she had built up had been betrayed by Leon Katz, who had tricked her into making confidences by pretending to already know their substance and lending a ready ear to Toklas' elaborations.  As a result, we now know that, in her twenties, Stein had been infatuated with a May Bookstaver, whose rejection inspired Stein's autobiographical novel Q.E.D. --as well as a pathological jealousy on Toklas' part:  At Toklas' insistence, Stein was forced to burn all Bookstavers' letters to her, as well as to extirpate the word "may", or "May", from Stanzas on Meditation, a book-length poem.  "[M]ay" or "May" was replaced with less felicitous words each of the over 400 times it appeared in the original manuscript before Toklas was satisfied.

          Until Katz made his disclosures, most assumed that Stein "wore the pants", as they used to say.  Who knew?  Then again, who would have thought that ungainly, corpulent Stein was "sexy", as Malcolm says.  Or that the two women were self-denying Jews who took help from a collaborator and anti-Semite, Faÿ?  And finally, that Toklas converted to Roman Catholicism after Stein's death, devoting herself to her new faith with such fervor that Donald Sutherland, for one, thought that if Stein hadn't limited Toklas to a life estate after Stein's death, the artworks would have gone to the Vatican?

          In her last years, Toklas believed, as Catholics do, that she would be reunited with Stein.  One can only wonder what Stein would have made of that.  The many contradictions in Stein and Toklas' lives, their desires for literary glory, their attempts to tailor their joint reputation to suit their private vanities, probably consign them to a lesser place in the countercultural pantheon than they enjoyed in its heyday.       

          Literary fashions change: when I was in college, all my professors of English were disciples of the new criticism, a way of looking at literature --and poetry, in particular, that depended on close textual analysis alone.  The waves that followed --postmodernism and anti-foundationalism--reject the idea of a "canon" of literature and emphasize the context in which the writer writes: his race, his religion, the country he grew up in, his sexual orientation, being inseparable from the work.  Were Stein to be required reading in English departments, it's hard to know whether her technical innovations in written English would favorably overwhelm considerations of her moral obtuseness in the face of Nazism.

          For someone who desired so ardently to be acknowledged for her brilliance in shattering the formal structures of the novel, the result is paradoxical. Because she did not have a novelists imagination, she broke down the language of the novel's discourse and used language in a new way.  However, by doing so, she undermined the very tradition that might have fed the glory she sought --and left her private life --which by any measure, undermines her reputation --alone.