Gertrude & Alice

Gertrude & Alice, Diana Souhami’s biography of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas is wonderful. Whether you’re interested in modern art, modern literature, or modern love, the book will entertain and inform you with every bit of Souhami’s nostalgic, reverential writing. However, the book really takes off when the talented biographer gets out of the way. Here are some of my favorite examples:

Gertrude wrote her love,

Our pleasure is to do every day the work of that day, to cut our hair and not want blue eyes and to be reasonable and obedient. To obey and not split hairs. This is our duty and our pleasure… Every day we get up and say we are awake today. By this we mean that we are up early and we are up late. We eat our breakfast and smoke a cigar.

Gertrude writing about an eventful visit from Ezra Pound,

All he has to do is come in and sit down for half an hour. When he leaves, the chair’s broken, the lamp’s broken. Ez is fine, but I can’t afford to have him in this house. (When Pound expressed a desire to visit again, Stein responded,) I am so sorry but Miss Toklas has a bad toothache and beside we are busy picking wild flowers.

Gertrude after a revelation about literature,

I find that any kind of a book if you read with glasses and somebody is cutting your hair and so you cannot keep the glasses on and you use your glasses as a magnifying glass and so read word by word reading word by word makes the writing that is not anything be something.

Very regrettable but true.

So that shows to you that a whole thing is not interesting because as a whole well as a whole there has to be remembering and forgetting, but one at a time, oh one at a time there is something oh yes definitely something.

Gertrude on sexuality,

We are surrounded by homosexuals. They do all the good things in the arts and when I ran down the male ones to Hemingway it was because I thought he was a secret one… I like all people who produce and Alice does too and what they do in bed is their own business and what we do is not theirs.

Alice’s response to Gertrude’s wanting Alice to write a memoir,

I am a pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener and a pretty good needlewoman and a pretty good secretary and a pretty good editor and a pretty good vet for dogs and I have to do them all at once and I find it difficult to add being a pretty good author.

Alice recounting her final moments with Gertrude,

By this time Gertrude Stein was in a sad state of indecision and worry. I sat next to her and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question? Then the whole afternoon was troubled, confused and very uncertain, and later in the afternoon they took her away on a wheeled stretcher to the operating room and I never saw her again.

–Brian Contine