Staying On Alone: Letters of Alice B. Toklas

When Stein died in July 1946 she left the art, the flat, and the unpublished manuscripts in Toklas's keeping, and the letters collected here are the record of that keeping: a two-decade campaign, run from a writing table in the rue Christine, to get every last Stein manuscript into print — conducted alongside the business of simply surviving as the salon's remaining half. The correspondence tracks the making of the Cook Book and its notorious fudge, the uneasy Aromas and Flavors collaboration, the friends of the old life aging out of it, and the long legal siege by the Stein heirs that stripped the paintings from the walls and, in 1964, took the flat itself.

Edward Burns collected the letters in 1973, with an introduction by Gilbert Harrison; the title comes from the task the whole volume documents — staying on, alone, in the city and the story. As writing, the letters are the missing Toklas book: the dryness of What Is Remembered warmed by intimacy, gossip with perfect pitch, grief managed by syntax. As history, they are the primary source for the era's long epilogue — what happened to the household of 27 rue de Fleurus after the century moved out.

The arc is the epilogue of the salon, told to its surviving friends: the first stunned letters of the summer of 1946; the publishing campaign that put Stein's backlog into print volume by volume; the unexpected late career — a cookbook, its scandalous fudge, a second collection with an annotator she tolerated; and the slow constriction of money, health, and rooms, down to the eviction from the rue Christine and the final years in borrowed quarters, faith newly acquired and loyalty never once revised.

Read together, the letters answer the question What Is Remembered raised by stopping: this is what the remaining years contained — work, mostly, all of it in one name's service.