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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas | Introduction

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, published in 1933, is Gertrude Stein’s best-selling work and her most accessible. Consisting of seven chapters covering the first three decades of the twentieth century, the book is only incidentally about Toklas’s life. Its real subject, and narrator, is Stein herself, who reportedly had asked Toklas, her lifelong companion, for years to write her autobiography. When Toklas did not, Stein did. Stein published excerpts of the work in the Atlantic, which occasioned a response from behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner whose essay, ‘‘Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?’’ connected the style Stein employed in the book with her work on automatic writing in Harvard’s psychology laboratories a few decades before. Automatic writing, popularized by the surrealists in the 1920s, was writing that follows unconscious as well as conscious thought of the author. Stein’s writing certainly has some of that element in the Autobiography but on the whole she sticks to telling a story of her life and times in more or less chronological order. That life includes details of her relationships with artists and writers who would become some of the most famous of the twentieth century, including Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Max Jacob, and Sherwood Anderson. Stein’s book is modernist not only because she discusses modernist art and artists but because of how she represents her subject through indirection, paradox, repetition, and contradiction.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Summary

Before I Came to Paris
At three pages, this is the shortest chapter in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein inhabits the persona and speech patterns of Toklas throughout the book. The perceptions of other characters and the recounting of events, however, belong to both Stein and Toklas. For continuity, the narrator of the book will be referred to as Toklas.

Toklas introduces herself and provides some details about her life, mentioning, importantly, that her life changed after the San Francisco earthquake, and she met Gertrude Stein. Saying that she has only met three geniuses in her life, Toklas writes, ‘‘The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead.’’

My Arrival in Paris
In this chapter, Toklas notes that Stein’s book, Three Lives, is about to be published and that the writer is deep into writing the history of her family’s life, The Americans. Toklas describes the house at 27, rue de Fleurus, where the two held their Saturday evening salons, and the numerous pictures that Stein and her brother Leo had collected, which ‘‘completely covered the white-washed walls right up to the top of the very high ceiling.’’ She also introduces and comments on characters such as Stein’s maid Helene; Alfy Maurer, a former tenant of the house; Pablo Picasso; his mistress, Fernande; and Henri Matisse. Toklas describes their atelier as a very open place where anyone could come and look at the pictures. She notes, however, that because France is a formal place, guests need to mention the name of someone who told them about her place to gain entrance. The anecdotes are in no particular order but rather presented in the way in which the narrator remembers them.

Gertrude Stein in Paris: 1903–1907
In this chapter, Toklas recounts how Stein came to collect paintings by Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. Stein and her brother Leo bought their Cézannes from Ambrose Vollard, a gallery owner and art dealer who owned numerous paintings by Cézanne. The Steins also bought paintings by Matisse who, Toklas writes, was then poor and always depressed. Stein discovered Picasso’s work in a gallery and met the painter shortly after, often posing for portraits for him. Other people she mentions include Georges Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kathleen Bruce, Andrew Green, and Isadora Duncan. The relentless name-dropping and gossiping emphasize Stein’s belief that she was a seminal influence on much of modern painting. If she were to have written this book in her own voice, it would have smacked of egotism and arrogance, but from Toklas’s voice, it often... » Complete The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas Summary