approach to time as ‘‘the return,’’ writing:

The reader is constantly returned to events in such a way as to superimpose the present onto the past, to destroy linear temporality. At the same time, any single event is at the center of a constantly shifting set of accompanying events or associations . . . the pattern keeps changing, and virtually anything can be incorporated into the design.

Ironically, it is the appearance of conventional aspects of autobiography that made The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas a Literary Guild selection Stein and Toklas arrive in New York aboard the S.S. Champlain in 1934 in August 1933. The book’s popularity, however, does not stem from revelations about Stein’s inner life or from juicy details about Stein and Toklas’s sex life. While such subjects are standard fare for many celebrity autobiographies written today, Stein eschews anything emotional, choosing instead to concentrate on surfaces, just like the painters she admires, Cézanne and Picasso. Breslin notes:

‘‘The Autobiography’’ gives the inside by way of the outside; it plays down psychology and sticks to the surface, recording externals (objects, acts, dialogues) in a way that clearly manifests deliberate and idiosyncratic acts of selection and stylization.

These surface details are most often gossip about celebrity writers and artists, and descriptions about modern art. Readers were interested in these subjects partly because they knew many of these people from press reports about their scandalous behavior. Apollinaire, for example, was once a suspect in the theft of the Mona Lisa, and Picasso’s racy paintings were the subject of much speculation about the painter’s sexuality. But even this gossip was secondary to Stein’s true aim in writing the book, which was to create an impression of her life by describing all that surrounded her. Stein’s friends questioned the factual accuracy of her details about them in a 1935 essay in Transition magazine, ‘‘Testimony against Gertrude Stein.’’ But truth, for Stein, isn’t a literal accounting of what is there, but the impression of a particular mind and set of eyes. She treats her friends as literary characters rather than ‘‘actual’’ people whose behavior needs to be factually recorded. In this way, her autobiography is more like a novel than an autobiography, for it confounds readers’ expectations. Just as Matisse and Cézanne use paint to create a representation of their own experience, Stein uses words.

Michael Hoffman looks at Stein’s looseness with facts another way, arguing that ‘‘Stein’s form was the memoir, not a history . . . her technique was fictional from the start, and its aim was both personal publicity and self-justification.’’ Citing Stein’s use of a narrative persona, and her transformation of events into material for her story, Hoffman suggests that Stein’s book be read with the same tools one would use to read a work of fiction. The problem with this suggestion is that most people who read Stein’s book do not do so in a college classroom, and so are not necessarily aware of the different ‘‘tools’’ one brings to reading different kinds of writing. Most readers, regardless of Stein’s artifices, would probably read her reportage of people and events as being factually true. But in the end, does this matter? George Wickes, in Americans in Paris, argues that Stein was more interested in creating a myth of the Modernist movement rather than a factual recording of its events and players. In this sense, her ‘‘autobiography’’ is symbolic of a larger truth, one that transcends time while at the same time embracing it, one that suggests factual accuracy while also ignoring it. This truth suggests that Stein, like her ‘‘autobiography,’’ may be open to explanation, but in the final analysis, is inscrutable, like life itself.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Nonfiction Classics for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

From the first page of The Autobiography, Stein characterizes people in terms of their national identities. Although Alice introduces herself as an American, ‘‘I was born in San Francisco, California,’’ she explains that while the quality that best defines her mother is her temperament—‘‘my mother was a quiet charming woman named Emilie’’—her father is best defined by his national identity: ‘‘my father came of polish patriotic stock.’’ Here, Toklas’s father is so thoroughly identified by his nationality that she does not bother to give his name, as she does with her mother. Throughout The Autobiography, national labels often replace names. For example, Alice’s descriptions of Stein’s Saturday evenings repeatedly respond to the question she knows is on the reader’s mind—‘‘who were they all’’— with a list of nationalities. She explains, ‘‘groups of hungarian painters and writers . . . did get there,’’ and ‘‘quantities of germans.’’ She adds that ‘‘there was a fair sprinkling of americans.’’ Individuals are often known only by their nationalities: ‘‘the other german who came to the house in those days was a dull one’’; ‘‘there was another german whom I must admit we both liked.’’ Although both of these men are named elsewhere in the text, they are introduced and recognized first and foremost by their ‘‘german’’ identities. Carl Van Vechten is introduced only as a stranger in an adjacent opera box, who ‘‘might have been a dutchman, a scandinavian or an american.’’ The British painter Francis Rose is known only as ‘‘the englishman’’ for much of chapter 7. Alice makes a point of identifying the ‘‘three great dancers’’ she has known and the ‘‘three geniuses’’ she has known as all of different nationalities. Everywhere Stein and Toklas go, they conduct a nationality count, describing the atmosphere of a place according to the numbers of different nationalities there. In Palma de Mallorca, for example, Alice notes that ‘‘a great many americans seem to like it now but in those days [William] Cook and ourselves were the only americans . . . there were a few english . . . there were several french families.’’ Even the policeman who brings Stein and Toklas coal during World War I, ushers them safely in and out of their apartment ‘‘on dark nights when Zeppelins came,’’ and who, in Alice’s words, ‘‘became our all in all,’’ is identified only as ‘‘a stalwart breton.’’

Of course, referring to a person’s nationality in order to characterize him or her assumes that people of that nationality share essential traits. Stein lets the reader know that she is drawing on a number of essential qualities about French, Spanish, American, and German peoples. She explains that the essential character of the French is so immutable that it determines the types of architecture they build: ‘‘human nature is so permanent in France that they can afford to be as temporary as they like with their buildings.’’ This remark could, at one level, be dismissed as one of Stein’s witty aphorisms were it not for the sheer number of essentializing statements that pile up in The Autobiography. For example, Russians tell ‘‘the usual russian stories’’; because Picasso is Spanish ‘‘life is tragic and bitter and unhappy’’; the ‘‘american character’’ is essentially ‘‘abstract’’; and ‘‘germans . . . are not modern, they are a backward people.’’ Like many other characters who make a brief appearance in the book, Germaine Pichot is immediately identified by her national identity: ‘‘she was quiet and serious and spanish.’’ Moreover, her nationality manifests itself, for Stein, in her physical appearance: ‘‘she had the square shoulders and the unseeing fixed eyes of a spanish woman.’’ We learn that Pichot ‘‘had taken a young man to the hospital,’’ but what seems more central to an understanding of this woman is the fact that she has many sisters, all ‘‘married to different nationalities, even to turks and armenians.’’

However, while nationality is often treated as a physical attribute in this text, at the same time, one’s nationality is also described as an identity one takes on at certain moments. Nowhere is this more clear than in the conflicts between Stein and Picasso as they pore over Stein’s photographs of the Civil War: Picasso ‘‘would suddenly remember the spanish war and he became very spanish and very bitter and Spain and America in their persons could say very bitter things about each other’s country.’’ Here, nationality is not only described as an internalization of one’s country, it is also personified as Alice explains that the ‘‘Spain and America in their persons’’ give voice to their patriotism. But while Picasso, as a Spaniard, embodies Spain, Stein also describes his nationality as a transformative process: while looking at Stein’s photos, Picasso ‘‘became very spanish.’’ Picasso’s nationality is organic in both cases, however, as a country ‘‘living’’ inside his body and as an identity he ‘‘becomes’’ when reminded of traumatic national events in Spain.

A sense of national identity as organic is perhaps most clear in Stein’s descriptions of Mildred Aldrich, the figure she sets up in the text as an exemplary American citizen ‘‘with a George Washington face’’, whose national purity works as an antidote in ‘‘mixed’’ company. For Stein, Aldrich is ‘‘a very striking figure and a very satisfying one in the crowd of mixed nationalities.’’ Stein’s sense of personal ‘‘satisfaction’’ extends not only to Aldrich, but to their native land, America: ‘‘she made one very satisfied with one’s country, which had produced her.’’ Here Stein uses exactly the same terms, ‘‘insides’’ and ‘‘outsides,’’ to describe both the process of writing her own personal narrative of identity, (‘‘all your inside gets to be outside’’), and the national narratives of identity in the passages above—citizens come out of the country that ‘‘produces’’ them and they are simultaneously born with their country ‘‘in their persons.’’ This correspondence between the language Stein uses to describe personal and national subjectivity demonstrates that in The Autobiography she continues to ‘‘address the relationship between personal and national narratives of identity.’’

However, in the case of Mildred Aldrich, these boundaries between inside and outside, American and un-American, do not always remain firmly in place. Alice explains that she and Stein ‘‘teased her and told her she was beginning to look like a french peasant and she did, in a funny kind of way, born and bred new englander that she was.’’ While Aldrich can ‘‘look’’ like a French peasant despite her ‘‘breeding,’’ it is the nationality that is ‘‘bred’’ into her that makes her house, French in every other way, look American: ‘‘it was always astonishing that the inside of her little french peasant house with french furniture, french paint and a french servant and even a french poodle, looked completely american.’’ Although what amazes Stein and Toklas is the resilience of Aldrich’s American identity, Stein allows for a fluctuation between national identities here that her repeated essentializing would seem to belie—something French can look ‘‘completely american,’’ and someone ‘‘born and bred’’ in America can ‘‘look like a french peasant.’’

Throughout The Autobiography, in the midst of her catalogues of essentially German, Spanish, American, Russian, Hungarian, and English peoples, Stein repeatedly demonstrates the mutability of national identity. One can, according to Stein, ‘‘lose’’ one’s national identity and replace it with another:

Gertrude Stein always says that chicagoans spent so much energy losing Chicago that often it is difficult to know what they are . . . some lower their voices, some raise them, some get an english accent, some even get a german accent, some drawl, some speak in a very high tense voice, and some go chinese or spanish and do not move the lips.

Here, merely by changing the way they speak, ‘‘chicagoans’’ are so successful at changing their national identity that they become hard for Stein to recognize; ‘‘it is difficult to know what they are.’’ Thus, a transformation that has been described as organic in the text becomes a calculated construction of identity: even though they are Americans, Chicagoans can ‘‘go chinese or spanish.’’ In much the same way, Wyndham Lewis, who is British, can look ‘‘rather like a young frenchman on the rise, perhaps because his feet were very french, or at least his shoes.’’ Hemingway not only looks ‘‘rather foreign’’, but as an American journalist for a Canadian newspaper he provides ‘‘the canadian viewpoint.’’ Although The Autobiography underscores the idea that there is something essentially French about a Frenchman, and there is a discernible ‘‘canadian point of view,’’ as these examples suggest, this national essence can be captured or reflected by those who are not ‘‘produced’’ by that nation.

Even this attempt to locate an essence for each nationality, determined by where one is ‘‘born and bred,’’ falters at various times in the text. Moreover, in The Autobiography one can ‘‘be’’ a certain nationality without any relationship to anyone who was ‘‘born and bred’’ there. For example, Stein explains that because Constance Fletcher’s stepfather was an Englishman, ‘‘Constance became passionately an english woman.’’ Although Constance Fletcher is not from England, she ‘‘became’’ English. Thus, being ‘‘born and bred’’ gives no more access to a nationality than any other connection. Constance Fletcher seems to defy the entire concept of an essential national identity in that she is simulT taneously English and Italian, without having any mixed blood. Stein explains that ‘‘she was more italian than the italians. She admired her step-father and therefore was english but she was really dominated by the fine italian hand of Machiavelli.’’ This complex example demonstrates that not only can sheer ‘‘admiration’’ cause one to adopt a national identity, but also that one can adopt the national identity of a foreign country, an identity that is even more authentic than that of the people ‘‘born and bred’’ in that country.

Stein’s repeated emphasis in The Autobiography on the role national identity plays in personal relationships, politics, and the production of art must, in part, be attributed to the internationalism of the modernist movement in Paris at the time. The modernism in early twentieth-century Paris that Stein remembers was marked by the heterogeneity of the artists involved, a heterogeneity that would have made these expatriates more aware of national distinctions among their diverse group living together in a metropolitan zone. Fernande Olivier’s memoirs of the same period highlight the presence of different nationalities at Stein’s Saturday night salons. Olivier writes: ‘‘There was always a mixture of artists, bohemians, and professional people, and, of course, foreigners. It was an odd spectacle—this assortment of people from quite different worlds, all talking about art and literature.’’ For Olivier, what qualifies the group of ‘‘foreigners’’ as ‘‘different’’ from the other groups present is not their occupation— we don’t learn if they are ‘‘artists’’ or ‘‘professionals,’’ they are just ‘‘foreigners’’—but their place of birth, presumably outside of France. But because The Autobiography was written for American audiences between the two world wars and because it was fabulously successful during this period, it is equally important to read it in the context of the discourses that defined national identity in America at this time. This will help us to understand both the pressure on Stein to present essentialized national identities in a book she meant to be a bestseller in the United States and the risks she took in destabilizing this essential national subject.

The issue of what constitutes American citizenship was particularly pressing when Stein wrote The Autobiography in 1932. A dominant concern in American culture in the 1920s was defining and legislating nationality. Stein’s repeated use of essentialized national identities to label those in The Autobiography maintains what is at the center of contemporary discourses on nationality, namely the immutable ‘‘otherness’’ of foreigners. At the same time, however, the fact that people can change ethnic and national identities in the text clearly works against the prevailing discourses on nationality in the United States, from nativism to cultural pluralism.

Stein’s awareness of and concern with efforts in the United States to greatly curb legal immigration is clear in an interview she gave for the New York Times Magazine in May 1934. Stein explains:

I do not approve of the stringent immigration laws in America today. We need that stimulation of new blood . . . there is no reason why we should not select our immigrants with greater care, nor why we should not bar certain peoples and preserve the color line, for instance. But if we shut down on immigration completely we shall become stagnant . . . the next thing we should do is to relax the severity of immigration restrictions.

While Stein’s concern for what she calls ‘‘preserv[ing] the color line’’ lies at the heart of the immigration legislation she says she opposes, her description of the fluctuations between different nationalities in The Autobiography presents a mixing of national identities that in no way poses a threat to the purity of American nationality. Moreover, Stein’s discussion of national identity in The Autobiography implies that there are no essential differences that prohibit Americans Mildred Aldrich and Constance Fletcher from ‘‘being’’ French, British, or Italian.

Rather, for Stein, a person’s national identity is defined in The Autobiography by an absence—by what is lacking—rather than by what is present. What Barbara Mossberg calls ‘‘the presence of absence in the text’’ is repeatedly what determines national identity for Stein. In the following example, the absence of something, in this case ‘‘papers,’’ separates the ‘‘native born americans’’ from the ‘‘not very american looking citizens.’’ As Stein and Toklas arrive at the American embassy in London to obtain their passports for returning to France at the beginning of World War I, Stein, alarmed by the fact that ‘‘the embassy was very full of not very american looking citizens waiting their turn’’, expresses her concern to the ‘‘young american’’ who helps them. He explains that the foreigners ‘‘are easier . . . because they have papers, it is only the native born american who has no papers.’’ While the identity of a foreigner is determined by the papers he or she holds, the nationality of a ‘‘native born american’’ is determined by the absence of any papers that defines his or her identity.

Similarly, for Picasso, the absence of any sexuality on the part of the Americans who visit Stein’s salon, their ‘‘virginal quality,’’ leads him to identify them only by their nationality: ‘‘they are not men, they are not women, they are americans.’’ Later in the text, the absence of the name of Marie Laurencin’s father on her French passport, coupled with her mother’s refusal to speak the name of the ‘‘important personage’’ in the French government with whom she had a long-standing affair, determines that, although Marie is ‘‘technically German’’ by marriage, the French officials cannot question her because there is a possibility she is one of ‘‘them.’’ Stein explains: ‘‘naturally the officials could make no trouble for her, her passport made it clear that no one knew who her father was and they naturally were afraid because perhaps her father might be the president of the french republic.’’ What the passport ‘‘makes clear’’ is the absence of any concrete information. In the face of this blank space in Marie’s passport, the French officials who, based on her marriage, had previously labeled her as German, now determine that she is French.

The fluidity of Laurencin’s national identity in the example above is clearly associated with her marriage, but it is because she is a woman that a marriage necessarily means a change of identity (her German husband will never become French). This example raises the important issue of gender as it pertained to defining national identity in the wake of the Immigration Act of 1924. The quota system that the government set up to drastically reduce immigration into the United States in this period, and thus prevent the contamination of the ‘‘pure’’ American public, allowed for a number of important exceptions. In fact, these exceptions undermine the very definition of a national ‘‘essence’’ based on one’s place of birth. For example, if a husband and wife applied at the same time for immigrant visas and the United States had already admitted the quota of the immigrants from the wife’s country, the act allowed the wife to claim nationality through her husband’s place of birth. The act reads:

if a wife is of a different nationality from her alien husband and the entire number of immigration visas which may be issued to quota immigrants of her nationality for the calendar month has already been issued, her nationality may be determined by the country of birth of her husband.

In addition, if an alien child is born in a different country from his father, his nationality ‘‘shall be determined by the country of birth of the father if the father is entitled to an immigration visa.’’ Thus it is only the child’s and wife’s national identities that can fluctuate, never the man’s.

Numerous examples from The Autobiography support the idea, repeatedly emphasized by the feminist critics cited above, that feminine identities are associated with a fluidity and flexibility, and that masculine identities are not. In ‘‘Portraits and Repetition,’’ one of the six lectures Stein delivered before American audiences in 1934 and 1935, she explains that in her poem ‘‘Lucy Church Amiably’’ (1927), she makes a point of explaining ‘‘that women and children change . . . if men have not changed women and children have.’’ In The Autobiography, masculine identities are often associated with strict, stable national identities while feminized figures are more flexible concerning their national identities. Stein is both masculine and ‘‘completely, entirely american;’’ Toklas’s father is nameless, but of ‘‘polish patriotic stock,’’ while her mother is named, but is not identified with any particular nationality; Mildred Aldrich can ‘‘look like a French peasant’’; Constance Fletcher moves readily between her identity as English and Italian; Pichot’s sisters marry men known only as ‘‘turks and armenians’’; and it is the German men who visit Stein and Toklas who are known as ‘‘the germans.’’ Even Wyndham Lewis’s ability to ‘‘look like a young frenchman on the rise,’’ Stein implies, has much to do with the effeminate fashion statement his shoes make. Importantly, the only feminine characters who retain stable national identities in The Autobiography belong to the working class. In fact, the servants who work in the Stein/Toklas household are depicted as having the most static identities in the text. Even though 15 years pass between the time Hélène leaves the household in 1913 and returns in 1929, and her ‘‘husband had fallen on bad times’’ and her son had died, she remains exactly the same according to Toklas, ‘‘cheery as ever and enormously interested.’’ The servants who work for Stein and Toklas are also portrayed as interchangeable: ‘‘in Italy there was Maddalena quite as important in Italy as Hélène in Paris.’’

Central to Stein’s discussion of national identity in The Autobiography is her ability to identify nationalities by the presence of their specific national aesthetic. For Stein, nationality necessarily determines the aesthetics of any country, not just her own. For example, she explains that cubism developed ‘‘naturally’’ in Spain because the Spanish ‘‘realise abstraction.’’ For Stein, ‘‘their materialism is not the materialism of existence, of possession, it is the materialism of action and abstraction. And so cubism is spanish.’’ Alice explains that ‘‘we were very much struck, the first time Gertrude Stein and I went to Spain, which was a year or so after the beginning of cubism, to see how naturally cubism was made in Spain.’’ In The Autobiography, Stein emphasizes that not only cubism, but also the entire modernist movement and the techniques of modern warfare developed simultaneously. Thus, art and war do not stand in opposition to each other in the text; rather, aesthetics and national interests intersect. In one scene, Alice directly correlates the development of cubism with ‘‘the principle of the camouflage of the guns and the ships in the war’’. As Toklas, Stein, and Picasso walk in Paris one night during the war,

all of a sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camou- flaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C’est nous qui avons fait ça, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had. From Cézanne through him they had come to that.

Picasso, seemingly unfazed by military presence in Paris, is ‘‘spell-bound’’ by seeing the reflection of his own work on military weapons. However, when Picasso exclaims ‘‘we . . . have created that,’’ he highlights an affinity between his art and the war going on around him. With her emphasis on the influence that cubism has had on French camou- flage, Alice too makes a clear connection between modernist aesthetics and modern warfare. However, Picasso seems to go one step further when he exclaims, ‘‘it is we that have created that,’’ at some level taking responsibility for the cannons that are moving through Paris.

In The Autobiography Stein does more than present an analogous relationship between art and war; she claims that war is a ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘effective’’ aesthetic. The aesthetic form consistently takes precedence for Stein: ‘‘she says a landscape is such a natural arrangement for a battle-field’’, and the ‘‘very tall blond good-looking [German] young men who clicked their heels and bowed and then all evening stood solemnly at attention’’ at the Saturday evenings ‘‘made a very effective background to the rest of the crowd.’’ Stein’s reference to landscape in connection with war here is not an arbitrary one. As her work in Geography and Plays and her St. Rémy poems demonstrate, landscape was a crucial part of her thinking at this time. In fact, as she and Toklas approach the battlefield at the front for the first time, war becomes landscape:

we came to the battle-fields and the lines of trenches of both sides. To any one who did not see it as it was then it is impossible to imagine it. It was not terrifying it was strange. We were used to ruined houses and even ruined towns but this was different. It was a landscape. And it belonged to no country.

I remember hearing a french nurse once say and the only thing she did say of the front was . . . [it is] an absorbing landscape. And that was what it was as we saw it.

The strangeness Stein locates in this ‘‘landscape’’ is not a result of the aesthetic qualities of the front, but the fact that this battlefield is a no-man’sland. In the midst of the actual war at the front, Stein notes that one loses any ability to distinguish between nationalities: ‘‘it was wet and dark and there were a few people, one did not know whether they were chinamen or europeans.’’

Thus, the battlefield here loses any sign of nationality when it becomes ‘‘landscape’’—‘‘it belonged to no country.’’ However, for Stein, how each nationality interprets the land as landscape demonstrates the essential and ‘‘inevitable’’ differences between nationalities. She says:

Another thing that interested us enormously was how different the camouflage of the french looked from the camouflage of the germans, and then once we came across some very very neat camouflage and it was american. The idea was the same but as after all it was different nationalities who did it the difference was inevitable. The colour schemes were different, the designs were different, the way of placing them was different, it made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability.

While Stein’s discovery of the difference between French, German, and American camouflage supports what she sees as the ‘‘inevitable’’ differences between people from different nations, the camouflage tells her even more about the ‘‘inevitable’’ role that aesthetics play in transmitting nationality. Moreover, the passage above reflects that for Stein, nations engender a specific aesthetic, one so essential to their beings that they carry it within them into the quite unabstract realm of warfare.

At the same time that Stein’s attribution of a distinctive aesthetic to each nation reconfirms the connection between where one comes from and how one perceives the land around him or her, nationality also plays an important role here in destabilizing the bond between who one is and where one comes from. While nature remains constant and neutral here, each nationality perceives this same piece of the battlefield in a very different way. Thus, there is no essential connection between the way the land looks and the fact that it belongs to a certain country. Rather, the French countryside can be interpreted as French, German, or American, depending on how each culture constructs it. Thus, each nationality is able to imagine itself as part of the same landscape. Although Stein certainly posits that each nation is present in the style of its camou- flage, what seems even more striking are the ways in which the camouflage on the battlefield underscores Stein’s idea that nationality is a matter of absence, not presence. French, Germans, and Americans express the ‘‘inevitable’’ differences between their national identities by creating a pattern they believe will make them invisible in the landscape they occupy. That is, each different camouflage reflects each nationality’s perception of how the landscape would look without its own soldiers in it.

Significantly, Stein concludes her chapter in The Autobiography on the early years of the modernist art movement in Paris (1903–07) with an anecdote that underscores the direct connection she makes between aesthetics and nationality. At the close of chapter 3, Alice relates that after Stein’s manuscript of Three Lives was finally accepted by the Grafton Press in America, the editors dispatched a representative to Stein’s Paris apartment. The young man’s questions about Stein’s aesthetics were directly connected to her national identity: ‘‘You see, he said slightly hesitant, the director of the Grafton Press is under the impression that perhaps your knowledge of english. But I am an american, said Gertrude Stein indignantly. Yes yes I understand that perfectly now.’’ Stein’s response here, ‘‘but I am an american,’’ is presented as all that needs to be said in order to dismiss the ‘‘foreign’’ quality of her writing. For Stein, her aesthetics and her national identity are inextricably bound up together. That is, she writes the way she does precisely because she is an American.

But by 1932, after years of rejected manuscripts, Stein understood that she needed more than her own insistence to become a best-selling American author. Thus, The Autobiography represents Stein’s careful negotiation of the liminal border between public and private spheres. Stein faced a dilemma: how could she, a Jew, a lesbian, publish a private ‘‘love letter’’ to Alice as a best-selling book in America? After all, the reception of Stein’s work was plagued by accusations that she was an illegitimate ‘‘alien’’ whose experimental aesthetics called into question her claims to American citizenship.

In fact, Stein’s most recent attempt in her 10- year effort to publish in the Atlantic Monthly was met in January 1932 with an exasperated response from the magazine’s editor, Ellery Sedgwick, who not only refused to publish the piece but dismissed Stein’s work with the explanation: ‘‘we live in different worlds’’ (qtd. in Gallup 125). Not a year later, after reading the manuscript of The Autobiography, Sedgwick said that he would gladly publish excerpts of her book in the Atlantic Monthly because, he said, this ‘‘delightful book’’ fulfilled his ‘‘constant hope that the time would come when the real Miss Stein would pierce the smoke-screen with which she has always so mischievously surrounded herself’’. This is, however, a very carefully orchestrated revelation. Stein uses The Autobiography to present a framed self-portrait of ‘‘the real Miss Stein,’’ an important and accomplished American writer to be taken seriously. In The Autobiography Stein worked against her popular image as an ‘‘exotic expatriate or aesthetic hybrid’’ by presenting herself as a writer who works in legitimate genres, for whom there is ‘‘only one language and that is english.’’ Alice observes objectively that ‘‘it has always been rather ridiculous that she who is good friends with all the world and can know them and they can know her, has always been the admired of the precious.’’ As part of her careful orchestration, through Toklas, Stein attempts to debunk the idea that her salon was comprised of an exclusive crowd of elite artists: ‘‘really everybody could come in . . . there was no social privilege attached to knowing any one there . . .’’. Alice is very clear on what Stein wants to accomplish with The Autobiography: ‘‘Gertrude Stein wants readers not collectors. . . she wants her books read not owned.’’ Stein frames herself in The Autobiography as a woman of the people, a straightforward and indispensable American writer who deserves more serious attention from the American reading public.

The reviews of The Autobiography demonstrate that the book successfully provided an insider’s look at the modernist movement while at the same time combating Stein’s image in America as an incomprehensible aesthete. James Agee’s cover story on Stein in Time magazine emphasized the role that The Autobiography played in lifting the ‘‘self-induced fog’’ that had previously shrouded her. Supporting Alice’s claim that Stein was puzzled over her status among ‘‘the precious,’’ Agee concluded that ‘‘there is nothing precious or arty about her.’’ Reviewing the book for the Nation, William Troy explained that after reading The Autobiography, readers would be left with the sense that ‘‘Gertrude Stein is not nearly so isolated and eccentric a figure in American letters as is so often believed.’’ Rather, reviewers agreed with Stein that her work was accessible, readable, entertaining, and most importantly, not exclusively for an elite readership.

However, at the same time that The Autobiography marks Stein’s success at gaining popular attention, the reason she repeatedly referred to this text as a ‘‘joke’’ remains clear here. Ironically, it is both Stein’s revelation of the ‘‘real Miss Stein’’ in The Autobiography—the simple, thoroughly American author—and her access to the inner sanctum of the elite circles of high modernism that enable her to sell the story of her coupling with Alice to an American audience. That is, in order to sell The Autobiography Stein crafts a ‘‘new’’ national identity for herself in this text through the dissociation from her image as a continental aesthete. In The Autobiography Stein at once ventriloquizes Alice’s voice and a national voice, that of the plain-spoken American. With her adoption of a distinctly American aesthetic for her writing in The Autobiography and the success she achieved as a result, Stein demonstrates that nationality is an aesthetic that can be adopted. Moreover, Stein’s ‘‘completely and entirely’’ American voice underscores that national identity is an effect of narrative, an idea implicit in both her essentialized and destabilized depictions of nationality throughout The Autobiography.

Source: Phoebe Stein Davis, ‘‘Subjectivity and the Aesthetics of National Identity in Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,’’ in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 45, No. 1, Spring 1999, pp. 18–45.