the last book I ever read (Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade, excerpt ten)

from Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife by Francesca Wade:

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a joke, a myth, an audacious act of knowing artifice. It contravenes every rule of autobiography—and, in doing so, draws attention subtly to its own act of creation. Narrated, simply and charmingly, in Toklas’s voice, the book is a portrait of Stein through the eyes of her most intimate observer. Although she is the book’s ostensible subject, “Toklas” reveals little of herself—she is, she declares, 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.” The book begins with a brief account of Toklas’s childhood in San Francisco before skipping, within a couple of pages, to her transcendental meeting with Gertrude Stein, already hard at work on The Making of Americans. From here, the narrative presents a selective sequence of events from their charmed life together: raucous dinners in Montmartre studios, nights at the Russian ballet, European travels, and evenings at home, the salon teeming with distinguished visitors eager to pay homage. Friends are praised or skewered at will, scores are settled cheerfully; well-known figures are less likely to be celebrated here than scolded for an ancient petty crime toward Stein they had in all probability forgotten. As a history of the Parisian avant-garde, it’s deliberately abstruse: Toklas, humorously, tends to miss the point, noting personality quirks and oddities rather than the new directions in art and literature being pioneered before her eyes. (“ I like a view,” she declares early on, “but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”) The only genius fully recognized as such is Gertrude Stein. On the final page, the ruse is revealed with a wink: Gertrude Stein, writes “Toklas,” had always encouraged her to write her autobiography, but had given up hope that she was ever going to do it. Stein decided to write it for her, “and this is it.”

What no one knew was that the book had been written as a form of reparation. Toklas’s fury about the hidden manuscript had driven Stein to compose a work that would affirm her commitment to Toklas once and for all, uniting their names, publicly, forever. Every person who had caused strife between them was either excised from the narrative entirely or witheringly dismissed. Hemingway was demoted to a former friend whom Stein was faintly embarrassed to have encouraged in his writing; Leo Stein was not mentioned by name; May Bookstaver was smoothly erased from Stein’s personal history. Instead, Stein wrote into being a version of her life in which their roles were defined only by each other: Stein the genius husband, Toklas the adoring wife. On one level, it’s entirely Stein’s story: she dominates every page, bragging brazenly about her achievements. But at a second glance, Stein’s identity is contingent on Toklas’s recognizing and declaring: it is she who creates Stein, who makes possible everything Stein does. Toklas’s invisible household labor—the cooking, the sewing, the typing—is brought to the fore: Stein celebrates the wifely work which enables—even guarantees—her own achievement.