In “Wars I Have Seen” (1945), her memoir of the Second World War, Gertrude Stein writes of the remarkable kindness of a young Frenchman named Paul Genin, the owner of a silk factory in Lyons and a country neighbor, who came to her after America entered the war and asked if she needed money. She did—the funds from America on which she and Alice B. Toklas depended no longer arrived—and he offered her a matching monthly stipend. Stein and Toklas lived on Genin’s kindness for six months, after which Stein sold a Cézanne (“quite quietly to some one who came to see me”) and no longer needed money. “And so I thanked Paul Genin and paid him back and he said if you ever need me just tell me, and that was that.”
Stein goes on to reflect, “Life is funny that way. It always is funny that way, the ones that naturally should offer do not, and those who have no reason to offer it, do, you never know you never do know where your good-fortune is to come from.”
There is another story illustrating life’s funniness that Stein might have told in “Wars I Have Seen.” In July, 2003, a few weeks after this magazine published an article about Stein and Toklas’s experiences in wartime France, an accusatory letter appeared in its letters column. The letter cited the infamous Gestapo raid on an orphanage in the village of Izieu in which forty-four Jewish children between the ages of four and seventeen and their seven supervisors were seized and ultimately shipped to death camps. The orphanage, the correspondent wrote, was “not far from Stein and Toklas’s house in Culoz,” and, “in the light of this history, Stein’s comment in ‘Wars I Have Seen’ about becoming frightened only after the American soldiers arrived and she began ‘hearing what had been happening to others’ is somewhat hard to believe.” I spoke to the Stein scholars Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns about the troubling question this letter raised, and they suggested that I write to someone in Paris who might be able to answer it. This was Paul Genin’s stepdaughter, Joan Chapman, who had been in close touch with Stein and Toklas at the time of the Izieu raid and would be apt to know what they knew or didn’t know. I wrote to Joan Chapman and received this reply:
Joan Chapman went on to tell this story:
The story chills the blood and more than confirms the view that Stein did not behave well in the Second World War. To propose that a Jewish child be sent to a Jewish family at a time when everywhere in France Jews were being rounded up was an act of almost inconceivable callousness. Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns agreed that Stein’s advice was inexplicable and terrible. We imagined together the tragic fate of the beautiful little boy.
A year later, when Joan Chapman was visiting America, I met with her and questioned her about the incident of the Jewish child. As we talked—as more details about the incident emerged—the story changed. As its bare bones took on flesh, Stein’s interference no longer damned her. The writer of the accusatory letter had dated the Izieu raid April 6, 1943, but in fact it took place on April 6, 1944, four months before France was liberated. Joan Chapman assured me that Stein’s advice had not put Manfred Iudas’s life at risk; the child went to the Jewish family only after Liberation, when Jews were no longer in danger. Joan Chapman had not realized that her laconic account could be read as a condemnation of Stein. She assumed that we knew what she knew.
The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties. Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best. And almost nothing we are told remains the same when retold. When Joan Chapman, who is an attractive and vigorous woman of eighty, with an excellent memory, retold the story of Manfred Iudas, she said that a second child had come with him from the orphanage, an older, non-Jewish boy. She did not remember why this boy came—perhaps to keep Manfred company? She couldn’t say. The second boy exemplified the fat we cut off when we compose a lean narrative. Under my questioning, Joan Chapman told the story of the Jewish boy as a story of regret for herself and her mother, Nena.
“He was adorable,” she said. “He was very bright. And he looked uncannily like a nephew of my mother’s. My mother and Paul couldn’t have children. He would have been a wonderful boy for them to have. And I would have been very pleased to have a brother. I regretted him. I regretted him for a long time. ”
Joan Chapman told me how her family became acquainted with Stein and Toklas. Her mother, leafing through the local telephone directory, was astonished to see the name Gertrude Stein. She called Stein’s number and Stein answered the phone. “Are you Gertrude Stein?” Nena asked. “Yes.” “Are you the Gertrude Stein?” “Yes.” Nena told Stein that she had just moved into the neighborhood and Stein said, “I’ll be right over.” Stein barely mentions Nena and Joan in “Wars I Have Seen.” We know from “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” (1933)—Stein’s book about herself written in the voice of Toklas—that Stein’s interest in young men (Paul Genin was in his mid-thirties at the time of his loan) did not extend to their wives. At her gatherings in the Rue de Fleurus, she assigned Alice to sit with them. “Before I decided to write this book my twenty-five years with Gertrude Stein, I had often said that I would write, The wives of geniuses I have sat with. I have sat with so many,” Stein mischievously wrote. However, in the case of the Genins Stein did not favor Paul over his wife. Joan Chapman remembers being jealous of Stein’s attention to her mother: “She liked me, but she liked my mother more. Gertrude was like the sun—very warm. I adored her. She had a beautiful face. She had beautiful brown eyes, she had lovely hands. She was much better-looking than Alice, who was hideous. Alice was all sort of spiky. She looked like a witch. She had this mustache. Alice was not warm and welcoming, not as nice as Gertrude. I remember feeling that Alice had another look on us. She didn’t need people the way Gertrude did. Gertrude needed to see us because it fed her art. She never invented anything, apparently. We saw her three or four times a week when they lived in Bilignin. When they moved to Culoz, it was once a week. After the war, we hardly saw them. Gertrude was lionized by all those people.”
“She dropped you?”
“Yes. You must understand, she was suddenly in the midst of all those people arriving and making a fuss over her. Those wonderful people. We weren’t very interesting, were we?”
“Did you mind?”
“Oh, yes. I think my mother did very much. But Paul now says, ‘Well, c’est normal. Gertrude saw us because she was bored—she had to see somebody.’ ” Paul Genin is ninety-eight and still owns property near Bilignin.
Joan Chapman returned to the subject of the Jewish boy. “My mother talked to Gertrude about it and Gertrude said, ‘No way. He’s a Jewish child and has to be adopted by Jewish parents.’ It was an extraordinary thing to say because Gertrude was not a practicing Jew.”
But, given that the child’s safety was not at stake, it was not such an extraordinary thing for Stein—or for any Jew (practicing or non-practicing)—to say. As one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s characters puts it, “The whole point of Jewishness is isolation.” Stein kept her Jewishness out of her work and out of her public persona, but she never abjured it. When she was twenty-two, she wrote a paper for a Radcliffe writing class in “argumentative composition” entitled “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in Isolation.” “Isolation means no intermarriage with an alien,” the young Stein wrote, and went on, “The Jew shall marry only the Jew. He may have business friends among the Gentiles, he may mix with them in their work and in their pleasures, he will go to their schools and receive their instructions, but in the sacred precincts of the home, in the close union of family and of kinsfolk he must be a Jew with Jews; the Gentile has no place there.” Fifty years later, she had evidently not changed her views; her horror at the idea of a Jewish boy living out his childhood in a Gentile home is of a piece with them.
At the end of the paper, Stein writes, “So long as the Jews keep themselves isolated so long are they bound to be subject to persecution to a greater or less extent. We must ask whether they gain enough by this exclusion to make it worth while to be in this attitude of separateness and persecution. Yes. I think they do!” The compensation, she writes, is the unbreakable bond between Jews everywhere:
On this point the young and the mature Stein do not agree. The mature Stein would go to the Christian every time. Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Carl Van Vechten, Thornton Wilder, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Faÿ, W. G. Rogers, Francis Rose—her great friends (and ultimately, in some cases, great enemies) were goyim. We know of no Jew to whom Stein turned in spiritual or material need. To be sure, her “marriage” was to a Jew, and she remained close to the family of her oldest brother, Michael. But the world she describes in “The Autobiography” is as far from the world of Isaac Singer as one can come. As she grew into her role of modernist genius, the “Jewish question” seems to have faded from her consciousness; the vehemence of her reaction to Nena’s wish to adopt Manfred Iudas was a piece of momentary atavism.
But what do we know? Perhaps Stein had a secret Jewish life. Biography and autobiography are the aggregate of what, in the former, the author happens to learn, and, in the latter, he chooses to tell. A cache of letters between Stein and a rabbi may be discovered that will cast a whole new light on Stein’s Jewish identity. Such discoveries are a regular inconvenience of the biographical enterprise.
A rabbi, as it happens, has unexpectedly turned up in Alice Toklas’s biography. He is casually mentioned in a 1997 memoir by the Polish-born opera singer Doda Conrad, who lived and worked in Paris, and befriended Toklas in the last period of her life. Conrad writes of his chance encounter with Toklas in the early nineteen-fifties:
After the film, as Conrad helps her find a taxi, Toklas introduces herself and says, “Your name must be Doda, because you look surprisingly like the singer Doda Conrad.” He goes on, “Flattered that she had recognized me, I was even more enchanted to have met her.” A week later, Conrad comes to tea at Toklas’s elegant apartment at 5 Rue Christine. He rhapsodizes over the modernist masterpieces that entirely fill the walls of the salon, the luxe silver tea service, the dainty sandwiches and pâtisseries, the “atmosphere of exquisite hospitality.” Then he writes:
When Toklas wrote her autobiography, “What Is Remembered” (1963), she had evidently forgotten the rabbi of Ostrow. She writes of a trip to Poland to visit her paternal grandparents but fails to identify the grandfather as a rabbi. The words “rabbi” and “Jew” are entirely absent from the autobiography. Toklas’s un-Jewishness is one of her signatures. When a young Californian named Roland Duncan interviewed her in 1952 and cautiously approached the subject of Stein’s Jewishness, he was smartly slapped on the wrist:
When Toklas became a Catholic, in 1957, she went so far as to characterize the conversion not as a repudiation of Judaism but as a return to the Church. She told the writer Janet Flanner, in all seriousness, that she had been baptized in childhood when a Catholic friend of her parents sprinkled her with holy water. Flanner was also privy to Toklas’s remarkable idea that she would be reunited in Heaven with Stein, who, as a genius, had been spared the fate of her fellow plain-dead Jews and was waiting for her there. (The non-genius Toklas had to make do with the mechanisms for eternal life open to ordinary observant Catholics.) Doda Conrad, Virgil Thomson, Donald Sutherland, and other friends of Toklas’s old age have also reported this rigmarole.
Toklas’s acknowledgment of her Jewish roots to Doda Conrad may be an example of the bonding that Stein celebrated in her paper on Jewish isolation. To a Jewish stranger, Toklas could say what she wouldn’t say to her Christian friends—and to the readers of her autobiography, whom she imagined as goyim.
Linda Simon, in her “Biography of Alice B. Toklas,” establishes, through archival research, that Toklas’s father, Ferdinand, married a woman from a German Jewish family named Emma Levinsky. So where does that leave the small Spanish Jewess? And whose invention is she? Ulla Dydo and Edward Burns often spoke of Toklas as a liar. When I asked them to give me examples of her lies, they were at a loss, but adhered to their conviction of her untruthfulness. Doda Conrad’s veracity is unknown to me. There is no doubt, however, that he and Janet Flanner were the chief support of Toklas in the sad final years of her life. Conrad wrote to Burns in 1971 of “the strange, inexplicable Alice B. Toklas episode, a fleeting moment in my life.” He went on, “What induced me to ‘take over,’ as I did, after she broke her hipbone, early in 1964, was mainly the fact that nobody really made a move to do something. All her old friends (except Janet Flanner) were delighted and relieved to have the outsider Doda Conrad step in for them. (They sent checks, of course.). . .
“I marvel at the extent to which I got involved,” Conrad wrote. “I truly took fait et cause for someone I did not really know and, probably, did not really like.”
In her last years, Toklas sank into poverty; what Doda Conrad “took over” with Janet Flanner was the horrible tangle of Toklas’s finances and the task of soliciting money from her friends to keep her (barely) afloat. Toklas’s financial difficulties derived from Gertrude Stein’s will. Stein did and didn’t provide for her “wife” of forty years.
Stein wrote her will on July 23, 1946, after she had had a diagnosis of stomach cancer and was awaiting the useless surgery that ended her existence. She left her money and her collection of paintings to Toklas—but only for “her use for life”—a momentary stop on the way to their true destination: Stein’s nephew Allan, the only son of Michael Stein. Was this devotion to kin an object of Stein’s never quite extinguished Jewishness? Or was it a mere expression of the deeply ingrained belief, shared by Christian and Jew alike, that money has to stay in the family? In “The House of the Seven Gables,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wonderfully describes this conviction:
Stein disliked Allan but still felt impelled to make him her heir. As it turned out, he died before Toklas did, and next in line were his three children, Daniel, from his first marriage, and Michael and Gabrielle, from his second. The first wife, Yvonne, plays no role in Toklas’s biography; the second, Roubina (Toklas called her the Armenian), plays a large one. Stein’s collection of modernist paintings—acquired for not much money in the first decades of the twentieth century—had become valuable. In her will Stein wrote, “In so far as it may become necessary for [Toklas’s] proper maintenance and support, I authorize my Executors to make payments to her from the principal of my Estate, and, for that purpose, to reduce to cash any paintings or other personal property belonging to my Estate.” This would seem to take care of Toklas very nicely. But it didn’t.
Wills are uncanny and electric documents. They lie dormant for years and then spring to life when their author dies, as if death were rain. Their effect on those they enrich or disappoint is never negligible, and sometimes unexpectedly charged. They thrust living and dead into a final fierce clasp of love or hatred. But they are not written in stone—for all their granite legal language—and they can be bent to subvert the wishes of the writer. Such was the case with Stein’s will. The painting collection did not maintain and support Toklas in her fragile old age; in fact, in April, 1961, while she was away at a spa in Italy taking a mud cure for arthritis, it was seized from her apartment. The Armenian, claiming that the paintings were not safe during Toklas’s absence, had received legal authority to remove them to a vault in the Chase Manhattan Bank in Paris; when Toklas returned to the apartment, she found only their outlines on the walls.
In two pieces in this magazine—one in 1961 and the other in 1975—Janet Flanner traced a line leading from Stein’s will to Roubina’s brutal act. According to Flanner, much of Toklas’s trouble stemmed from Stein’s decision, “on sound tax counsel,” to place her estate under the jurisdiction of the probate court in Baltimore, and to the court’s appointment of a man named Edgar Allan Poe (the poet’s great-nephew) to administer it. (Stein named Toklas and Allan Stein executors, but for reasons no longer known they renounced or were forced to renounce this role, and Poe took over.)
“Gertrude had been precise about how her funds were to be spent, but, unaccountably, Poe proved to be an obstructionist and parsimonious in fulfilling her wishes, of which he seemed to disapprove, although it was none of his business,” Flanner wrote in her piece of December, 1975. As well as providing for Toklas, Stein had provided for her own literary immortality: “I desire my Executors hereinafter named to pay to Carl Van Vechten, of 101 Central Park W., New York City, such sum of money as the said Carl Van Vechten shall, in his own absolute discretion, deem necessary for the publication of my unpublished manuscripts.” Flanner suggests that it was Poe’s dilatoriness both in funding the publication of Stein’s unpublished work and in sending Toklas her monthly personal allowance of four hundred dollars that drove her to the rash act that precipitated the seizure of the paintings. “Alice cajoled and threatened,” Flanner writes. “Poe sent money in driblets, and in 1954 Alice, who was desperate, finally sold about forty Picasso drawings without informing Poe.” When Roubina—who was keeping “a beady eye upon the pictures in the interests of her minor children”—discovered that the drawings were gone, she began the legal proceedings that ended in the raid on the apartment. In a letter of 1965, Daniel Stein (for all that he would be a beneficiary of his stepmother’s interventions) wrote of Roubina with exuberant malice: she “has always been a devious, hypocritical, and thoroughly unprincipled being willing to stop at nothing to achieve her ends, whatever they were. She is something between a Mexican bandit and one of those Egyptian infiltrators who used to cross over into Israel and murder the children of the kibbutzim in their beds.”
The minor characters of biography, like their counterparts in fiction, are less tenderly treated than major characters. The writer uses them to advance his narrative and carelessly drops them when they have performed their function. Look at how I have used poor Roubina! Unlike the flat characters of fiction (as E. M. Forster called them), who have no existence outside the novel they were invented to ornament, the flat characters of biography are actual, three-dimensional people. But the biographer is writing a life, not lives, and, to keep himself on course, must cultivate a kind of narcissism on behalf of his subject that blinds him to the full humanity of anyone else. As he turns the bracing storylessness of human life into the flaccid narrativity of biography, he cannot worry about the people who never asked to be dragged into his shaky enterprise.
One of the notable features of “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” is Stein’s high-handed treatment of the lesser people in her circle. She flattens them as perhaps no biographer has ever flattened a character before or since. Stein was both happy about and a little ashamed of the success of “The Autobiography.” It was the only one of her works that she made any money from, and she distinguished it from her unprofitable works by calling it an “audience” work, as opposed to the hermetic writings that she considered her real work. By writing in Toklas’s voice, Stein made herself speak a more conventional English than the English she speaks in the hermetic works, but what the audience liked about the book wasn’t merely that it could understand it. The audience recognized that it had been given something truly original—the work is as advanced and experimental, as wild and subversive as the most advanced and experimental and wild and subversive of Stein’s works. It is—among the other things it is—an anti-biography. Stein’s presentation of herself in the book as one of the world’s greatest geniuses, and of every other person as someone put on earth only to amuse or irritate her, is surely a reflection not of the way she saw herself and her friends but of the way she thought about biographical representation. Early in the book, she writes of a servant named Hélène who worked for Stein and her brother Leo in the early days of the Rue de Fleurus salon:
Stein’s heartlessness (“and her boy had died”) is like the heartlessness of Hilaire Belloc’s “Cautionary Tales for Children.” The author of “Three Lives” isn’t really indifferent to the agony of a mother who has lost her son. But she is not writing “Three Lives”; she is writing a book about how amusing life around Gertrude Stein is. The heartlessness is essential to the amusement the reader feels as he is propelled along the stream of Stein’s grotesque gaiety and egotism. Every day brings satisfaction. And every character is a foil for Stein’s ultra-importance. No one escapes diminishment. Even fellow-geniuses like Picasso do not quite reach the pinnacle where Stein placidly sits, but hover a little below it. “Now listen! I’m no fool,” Stein once said in reply to a student’s question about her line “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” “I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a . . . is a . . . is a . . .’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” Yet Stein’s boastfulness never got in the way of her understanding of human insignificance. As a child, she had looked at the night sky and recoiled from astronomy’s insult. “It was frightening when the first comet I saw made it real that the stars were worlds and the earth only one of them,” she wrote in “Everybody’s Autobiography.” “Dead is dead,” she wrote in “The Making of Americans,” her astonishing anti-novel that pushes its major characters aside in favor of an infinite number of unnamed persons whom she attempts to classify, and who resemble shades. “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” slyly mocks the immortality that biography seeks to bestow on its subjects. If you listen to the book’s music, you will catch the low hum of melancholy. If you regard it as an exercise in whistling in the dark, you will understand its brilliance.
After Stein’s death, Toklas pursued the protection and perpetuation of Stein’s legend with matchless zeal and devotion. At the same time, and without any slackening of her literary widow’s efforts, she came into her own as a personality. She no longer sat with the wives of geniuses. She began to have young men—if not young geniuses—of her own. One of these, the novelist Donald Windham, who had become acquainted with Toklas in Rome in the spring of 1961, noted, in a memoir called “The Roman Spring of Alice Toklas,” that “graciousness—unapologetic graciousness—was Alice Toklas’s most pervasive characteristic that spring: a graciousness that made her plain features appear beautiful as soon as you were at ease with her.” Windham’s memoir includes letters from Toklas to him and his partner, Sandy Campbell, that illustrate the observation. Graciousness radiates from her letters to Windham and Campbell and, indeed, from all her post-Stein correspondence. (Edward Burns collected it in a volume called “Staying on Alone,” published in 1973.) Toklas called letter-writing her “work,” and she did it extremely well. She had a kind of genius for it. The epistolary art is the art of favorable self-representation; Toklas emerges from her letters as a great lady, witty, self-deprecating, attentive, cultivated. Her forays into what Henry James called the “twaddle of graciousness” are especially masterly. Here she is thanking the American journalist W. G. Rogers for a gift parcel she received from him and his wife, Mildred, in March, 1947:
In another letter of thanks—this one for an “exquisite nosegay holder”—the twaddle becomes intertwined with a piece of history, and a grudge. “Never have I seen anything so lovely and it gives me so much pleasure,” Toklas writes to her friend Louise Taylor in January, 1947, and goes on:
What Toklas “won’t go into” and what Gertrude “wouldn’t ever let me mention” is the looting of bibelots, linens, and utensils from the apartment on Rue Christine during the pair’s wartime absence. The painting collection remained in place. There was a moment of danger in July, 1944, when four Gestapo men broke into the apartment and threatened to cut up and burn the Picassos, which they saw as saloperie juive. A resourceful neighbor called the French police, who were able to dispatch the Gestapo men by asking them for requisition orders that they did not have. (When the police arrived, the Gestapo men were in Stein’s bedroom trying on her Chinese coats.) A longer-term reprieve for the paintings was achieved by Bernard Faÿ, the collaborationist who protected Stein and Toklas during the war, and now used his influence to protect the art. But no one protected the pretty things that Toklas cherished. (In her memoir, she notes that a petit-point footstool she had made after a design by Picasso and a pair of Louis XV silver candlesticks were among the objects stolen from the apartment.) In her tour de force of resentment against Stein, swathed in yards of silky compliment to Louise Taylor, Toklas permits us a poignant glimpse of her position as the wife of a willful genius.
However, one of the most astute of Toklas’s young men, the classics professor and critic Donald Sutherland, questions whether Toklas ever actually played the wife-of-a-genius role as it is supposed to be played. In his memoir “Alice and Gertrude and Others” (1971), Sutherland tells this story:
Sutherland was put straight about Toklas’s steel, but, like Joan Chapman and everyone else who knew both women, he preferred Stein’s gold. During a final visit he makes to Toklas in 1966 (she died in 1967), an extraordinary memory of Stein comes to him. Toklas has brought up Hemingway and says, “You know, I made Gertrude get rid of him.”
The letter Sutherland means was written to W. G. Rogers on the occasion of the publication of his memoir “When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person” (1948). Hemingway wrote, “She used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it.”
Sutherland goes on, “I could well believe it, for the second time I met her she came too close and my sexual response was both unequivocal and, considering that I was nineteen and she sixty, bewildering. She said in a book I was very nervous when we first met; nervous would be no word for me the second time.”
Has the magazine dropped from the reader’s hand? Has anything prepared him for Sutherland’s erection? Hemingway’s line is the sort of macho showing off that one expects of him and only half believes. But Sutherland’s account has the ring of whole truth. Fattuski (as Stein called herself in the erotic poem “Lifting Belly”) was obviously a powerfully sexy woman, attractive to men as well as to women. It was no wonder that Alice was jealous of everyone, male or female, who “came too close.” (Ulla Dydo, in the course of trying to decipher a hermetic piece called “An Elucidation,” through the study of Stein’s notebooks, came to a surprising conclusion about Stein and Toklas’s sex life. She found reason to think that Stein regularly gave Toklas orgasms—called “cows” in the notebooks—but received none herself. “Her own sexual feelings,” Dydo writes in her 2003 book “Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises,” “always have a babyish and cuddly tone. Baby does not experience orgasms but wants cuddling.” This is a remarkable reversal of roles: outside the bedroom Toklas does all the work—she is cook, housekeeper, typist, secretary—but in bed it is Stein who labors; she calls herself “the best cow giver in all the world.”)
Sutherland and Toklas are having their conversation about Hemingway at her apartment, but it is not the elegant flat to which Doda Conrad came for tea and from which Roubina snatched the great paintings. Toklas has been evicted from 5 Rue Christine and is living in an austere fifth-floor flat in a modern building on the Rue de la Convention that Doda Conrad and Janet Flanner found for her. She is old and disabled. The threat of eviction had been hanging over her for many years, but she disregarded it, thinking she could beat it. When 5 Rue Christine was sold, she turned down the chance to buy her apartment, believing herself safe as an elderly statutory tenant. However, French law dictated that an apartment could not remain vacant for more than four months, and when Toklas was in Rome during the winter of 1960-61 the apartment’s owners made their move to expel her, filing eviction papers. She fought the expulsion for several years by getting influential people to intervene. In May, 1963, Toklas wrote to Sutherland, “Jo Barry and Doda Conrad are at work. Doda is getting Malraux to work. It appears he’s all powerful! Madeleine thinks that if General de Gaulle is not going to save me I had better go to a hotel at once.” But even Malraux and de Gaulle couldn’t make the impossible possible. Toklas was able to fend off the eviction for another year, but in November of 1964 it took place.
Sutherland was part of the group led by the forceful Doda Conrad that looked after the destitute, aged Toklas. In “Alice and Gertrude and Others,” he writes of visiting Toklas in 1965 at a nursing home where she is recovering from a broken hip. He finds her “sitting up in an armchair, dressed in a dressing gown which was not fresh and on which she had dribbled.” He asks her “as delicately as I could” about her finances and learns that “she was penniless, without even the pin-money to send a maid out for a newspaper or a bottle of toilet water.” Sutherland thrusts a few hundred francs into her purse and then reflects on the general problem of looking after Alice. The friends who have established a fund are afraid of putting it into her hands, lest she “spend it foolishly and run through it in a few months or less.” Conrad writes in his memoir, “It was difficult to satisfy Alice Toklas’s tastes, which were still extravagant. I remember tricking her by having fruit bought at the market and having it brought to her in used bags from Fauchon or Hédiard. This gave her the illusion of eating the best food Paris had to offer and of offering her visitors sherry of noble origins.” But Sutherland’s own fears are not about fancy food—they are about Catholic dogma. He worries about Toklas’s worry that her plan of meeting Gertrude in Heaven will go awry unless palms are greased. According to Catholic dogma, the unbaptized Stein is in Limbo. “How did one go about getting Gertrude out of Limbo? . . .With enough prayer, enough masses and candles, enough penitence, Gertrude could be sprung and settled in Purgatory to await Alice before they went on together to Heaven. It could be made very expensive, and it is possible that if Alice had a perfectly free hand, all or most of the Picasso collection would now be in the Vatican Museum.” Sutherland ends his mordant aria by noting of Toklas that “her own salvation was endangered now, for her confessor, finding her without money, had ceased to visit her.”
Virgil Thomson, in his 1966 autobiography, records a conversation with Gertrude Stein about a difference he saw between Jews and Christians. Jews, Thomson said, are always breaking up with their friends while Christians make up after quarrels. “The explanation I offered for such independent behavior was that the Jewish religion, though it sets aside a day for private Atonement, offers no mechanics for forgiveness. . . . When a Christian, on the other hand, knows he has done wrong to anyone, he is obliged in all honesty to attempt restitution; and the person he has wronged must thereupon forgive.” Stein took no umbrage at the slyly anti-Semitic comparison. In fact, she “liked this explanation, and for nearly twenty years it remained our convention.” Thomson adds:
We can get rid of him. The “we” leaps off the page. In no other memoir, in no letter or in any book or article, does Toklas identify herself as a Jew. (After her conversion, she was quick to assume a Christian identity; the term “our Lord Jesus Christ” rolled easily off her pen in a letter written the day after her admission to the Church.) It seems likely that Toklas in her remarks to Thomson maintained her customary distance from her tribe, and that Thomson—not realizing that Toklas was a Jew with explanations—interpolated the “we.” Toklas was hardly the only Jew to pretend she wasn’t one. She was born into an anti-Semitic world—one that not only produced Hitler but tolerated low-grade anti-Semitism among even its most civilized members. Here, for example, is the civilized Donald Sutherland, writing to Thornton Wilder’s sister, Isabel, about Toklas’s biographer: “I want to ask you about one Linda Simon. . . . Is she the impossibly preëmptive Jewess she sounds like, or something else?” Linda Simon is a reserved, soft-spoken professor of English literature at Skidmore College who is as far as it is possible to be from the pushy yenta of Sutherland’s imaginings. When she told me of the rebuffs she received while working on her book on Toklas thirty years ago, she attributed them to her youth and inexperience, but, after reading Sutherland’s letter, I wondered whether being Jewish was held against her as well.
In “When This You See Remember Me,” Rogers writes of a car trip in the French countryside with Stein and Toklas—during which the two women constantly fought. Every arrangement was an occasion for dispute. Stein was the naughty child who wants to have fun no matter what, and Toklas was the grownup with tightly compressed lips. “While few people question Miss Stein’s genius, not so much has been heard about Miss Toklas’. If the one is the creative spirit, the other is the immensely practical spirit,” Rogers tactfully writes, and goes on, “It was as if Miss Stein’s practical sense had been removed from her person and deposited in the person of Miss Toklas. The ego was in the front seat”—Stein did the driving: dangerously—“and the alter ego in the back. The battle which most geniuses fight within themselves was exteriorized and fought openly between her and her friend.” “Do you not get tired of always being right?” Stein wrote in an abstruse late work called “The Geographical History of America”—surely, on some level, addressing Toklas.
Posterity has not dealt kindly with Stein’s alter ego. Deep mythic structures determine who is likable and who isn’t among the famous dead. The practical spirit is an essential but unlovable spirit. Toklas remains the dour ugly crone to Stein’s handsome playful princess. The memoirists who profess to love Toklas (only Doda Conrad levelled about his feelings) allow their distaste to leak out. Sutherland cannot spare her the robe on which she has dribbled. Donald Windham notices that as she chews artichokes in a restaurant she is “unaware that the oil [is] running down her chin.” Doda Conrad, also watching Toklas eat, likens her to “a little voracious, ravenous animal throwing itself on its food, eyes fixed on the other half of the bite she has just swallowed for fear that it might escape!” Toklas’s efforts to secure Life Everlasting may have succeeded, but her hopes of being kindly remembered on earth have fallen short. As Gertrude Stein said, Life is funny that way. ♦
