Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas
by David Bianco
On the morning of July 27, 1946, in a Paris hospital, Alice B. Toklas kept
vigil at the bedside of her partner of almost 40 years, modernist writer
Gertrude Stein. Both women were worried, because Stein would soon undergo
surgery for cancer. Stein turned to Toklas and asked, "What is the answer?"
Toklas was silent. "In that case," Stein continued, "what is the question?"
The words have gone into history as the writer's last utterance.
Stein and Toklas each spent their youth in the San Francisco Bay area,
but they met and fell in love in Paris. Both had had prior romances with women.
Stein met her first lover, May Bookstaver, while studying psychology at
Johns Hopkins Medical School in the early 1890s. Bookstaver was simultaneously
involved with Stein and a mutual female friend. The romantic triangle
caused Stein great pain, which she exorcised by writing a novel about the
experience. Because of its lesbian content, Stein put Q.E.D. away in a
closet, and the novel was not published until four years after her death.
Disillusioned by medical school and eager to forget Bookstaver, Stein
went to Paris in 1903 to become a writer.
In the 1890s, Toklas was studying piano at the University of Washington
and enjoying romantic friendships there with other young women. But both her
musical career and the budding of her lesbian sexuality were cut short
when her mother became ill and died. Toklas returned to San Francisco to take
charge of the household. After 10 years of caring for her father and
brother, she became fed up and used an inheritance from her grandfather to sail to
Paris in 1907. On September 8, one of her first days there, she received
an invitation to dinner from fellow San Franciscans Sarah and Michael Stein,
Gertrude's sister-in-law and oldest brother. Toklas recalled that when
she met Gertrude Stein that evening she heard bells ringing, which she took
as a sign that she was in the presence of genius.
Stein and Toklas discovered they had many mutual interests, such as
modern art and literature, but their biggest common interest was Gertrude Stein.
The two began meeting every day at Stein's apartment, where they discussed
her work-in-progress, The Making of Americans, and Toklas taught herself to
type so she could transcribe the manuscript.
Toklas soon moved in with Stein, and they settled into married life.
Stein's pet names for her lover included "wifie" and "pussy"; in turn, Toklas
called Stein "hubbie," "lovey," and "Mount Fatty." Toklas managed all the
domestic chores so that Stein was free to write. In addition, she typed Stein's
work and scrupulously checked the galley proofs of her books. Since Stein got
to fulfill herself while Toklas simply took care of her, some lesbian
scholars have criticized their relationship as mimicking the worst heterosexual marriage.
However, both women expressed contentment in their relationship and
devotion to each other. Toklas was, Stein said, "all to me." They left daily love
notes to each other signed "DD" and "YD" ("Darling Darling" and "Your
Darling"). Stein wrote about their seemingly robust sex life, using code
words like "cow" for orgasm. "I am fondest of all of lifting belly,"
reads Stein's "Lifting Belly," a 50-page tribute to lesbian sex:
Lifting belly
So high
And aiming.
Exactly
And making
A cow
Come out
...That is what I adore always more and more.
Though Stein was a prolific writer, most of her work was considered too
experimental for large publishers. Her prose, like her poetry, contained
many repetitive phrases and not much punctuation. As a result, Stein's early
books were either self-published or put out by small presses and received
little public attention or money. Stein and Toklas lived almost solely off their
modest inheritances. It wasn't until 1934, with the publication of
Stein's whimsical Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (which was more about her
own genius than about Toklas) and a lecture tour of the United States, that
the author became a celebrity. Her writing was suddenly in demand, and the
couple's finances were secured.
Over the years, Stein and Toklas were inseparable, dividing their time
between Paris and a rented house in the south of France. Together they
witnessed two world wars at close range. During World War I, they used
their Ford car, "Auntie," as a supply truck and ambulance, hauling equipment,
provisions, and wounded French and American soldiers across the country.
They received medals from the French government for their war service. In the
Second World War, when the Germans occupied Paris, the two women, who
were both Jewish and by then in their sixties, moved to their country house for safety.
Soon after the end of World War II, Stein was diagnosed with cancer. She
died during surgery at the age of 72. Toklas lived another 21 years, mostly
managing Stein's literary estate. But she also tried her hand at writing,
contributing articles on cooking to U.S. magazines and compiling her
memoirs of life with Stein, What Is Remembered. A reviewer in Time magazine
called Toklas "a woman who all her life has looked in a mirror and seen
someone else." When Toklas died in 1967 at the age of 90, she was buried
with Stein in a joint plot in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.
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