Alice B. Toklas

San Francisco

Alice Babette Toklas was born on 30 April 1877 in San Francisco, into a middle-class Jewish family of Polish descent. Her father, Ferdinand Toklas, ran a business; her mother, Emma, died when Alice was twenty.[3]

After her mother's death Alice kept house for her father, grandfather, brother and various uncles for the best part of a decade. She had trained seriously as a pianist and wanted to be a musician, and instead she managed a household of men. She was thirty when she left San Francisco.[3]

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 broke up that routine. In the weeks afterwards she met Sarah and Michael Stein — Gertrude's brother and sister-in-law — who were visiting from Paris with a Matisse painting. They talked about Paris, and Toklas decided to go.[3]

Meeting Gertrude Stein

Toklas arrived in Paris in September 1907 with her friend Harriet Levy. She met Gertrude Stein on 8 September, the day after arriving, at the apartment of Stein's brother Michael and his wife Sarah on the rue Madame. She later wrote that meeting Stein made a bell ring inside her, the sign she said she felt on meeting a genius. By her own account the bell rang three times in her life: for Gertrude Stein, for Pablo Picasso, and for the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.[3]

For the first years she went on living with Harriet Levy on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. Within a year of the meeting she was travelling with the Steins, to Italy and the Piazza San Marco among other places. She began going to the flat at 27 rue de Fleurus, typing Stein's manuscripts, and by 1910 she had moved in. Leo Stein, Gertrude's brother, was still living there; the arrangement lasted until Leo and Gertrude divided the paintings and separated in 1913 and 1914.[2]

Toklas and Stein remained together until Stein's death in 1946.

What she actually did

The division of labour in the household was explicit. At the Saturday gatherings Stein talked to the artists; Toklas talked to their wives and girlfriends, in a corner, and this was understood by everyone present as a rule of the house.[1]

Away from the visitors, Toklas typed everything Stein wrote, from handwritten notebooks that were often close to illegible. That included the thousand pages of The Making of Americans. She corrected, queried and filed. She managed the money, the servants, the cooking and the travel, and she dealt with printers, publishers and agents.[1]

When commercial publishers would not take Stein's experimental books, Toklas set up a small press. Plain Edition, run by Toklas from 1930, published five volumes of Stein's work, paid for by selling a Picasso.[1]

The First World War

From 1916, during the First World War, Stein and Toklas drove supplies for the American Fund for French Wounded. They bought a Ford van, had it fitted out as a truck, and worked in Perpignan and later in Alsace.[2]

Stein drove, badly and only forwards; she never learned to reverse. Toklas read the maps, kept the records and handed out the supplies. Both women were decorated by the French government for the work.[2]

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

In 1932 Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in about six weeks. It is Stein's memoir written in Toklas's voice — Toklas as narrator, describing Stein from outside, admiring her.[2]

The device is the joke. Toklas, who published almost nothing, is given the narrator's voice, and Stein, who wrote constantly, praises herself from behind it. The book's last line says outright that Stein wrote it.

Published in 1933, it became an American bestseller and made Stein famous at fifty-nine. It also made Toklas publicly known as the book's narrator, a voice Stein had written for her. Toklas is on record as having liked it.[1]

The occupation

Stein and Toklas were Jewish and American, living in France when Germany invaded. They spent the war in the countryside at Bilignin and then Culoz, in the Rhône-Alpes, and were not deported.

They were protected in part by Bernard Faÿ, a friend and academic who ran the Bibliothèque Nationale under Vichy, led its campaign against Freemasonry, and had personal access to Marshal Pétain. Their Picassos survived in the Paris flat. Toklas later helped Faÿ after he was convicted of collaboration.

After Stein's death

Gertrude Stein died on 27 July 1946. Her will left Toklas the use of the paintings and the apartment for her lifetime, with the collection eventually going to Stein's nephew's family.[1]

The will did not let her sell the paintings, so she had little to live on. Toklas sold what she was allowed to sell. In 1961, while she was in Italy for medical treatment, Stein's relatives removed the paintings from the apartment and put them in a bank vault, arguing that she was not keeping them safe. Toklas came back to bare walls at eighty-four.[1]

Friends organised money for her. In 1964 she was evicted from the flat at 5 rue Christine, where she had lived with Stein since 1938, and moved to a flat in the fifteenth arrondissement.[4]

The Cook Book

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book was published in 1954, when Toklas was seventy-seven. It is a cookbook and a memoir at the same time: recipes from thirty years of French kitchens, set among stories about Picasso, Matisse, the war, the servants and Stein.

One recipe was contributed by a friend, the artist Brion Gysin: haschich fudge, a confection of fruit, nuts, spices and cannabis. Toklas said she had not read it properly before it went in. The recipe made her a household name in America in the 1960s, and "Alice B. Toklas brownies" entered the language, attached to a woman who had almost nothing to do with them.

She published a second book, Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present, in 1958, and a memoir, What Is Remembered, in 1963.[3]

Catholicism and death

Toklas converted to Catholicism in 1957. She had been raised Jewish; her stated reason was that she wanted to see Gertrude again in the afterlife, and she asked a priest whether that was possible.

She died in Paris on 7 March 1967, aged eighty-nine, in poverty. She is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery in the same grave as Stein, with her name and dates cut into the back of the headstone.[5]

Why Alice B. Toklas matters

Toklas is remembered as a supporting figure, and she chose that position deliberately. What she did was make the work possible: the typing, the publishing, the household, the press she ran when nobody else would print Stein.

Her own book is the second reason she is read. The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book is a first-hand account of daily life in the Paris of Picasso and Matisse, written from the kitchen rather than the salon. Few other accounts of those years describe the household from that side.

The salon

The salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, which Toklas ran the domestic side of, drew Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and the young Ernest Hemingway among many others. Gertrude Stein wrote at night, and Toklas ran everything else — the typing, the household, the money and the visitors.[6]