Alice B. Toklas moves in with Gertrude Stein.
On September 9, 1910, almost exactly three years after they met, Alice B. Toklas moved in with famous comma-hater Gertrude Stein at 27 rue de Fleurus in Paris—that would be in the 6th arrondissement on the Rive Gauche, of course (as the saying goes, “La Rive Gauche pense, et la Rive Droite dépense”). Their relationship, and their place at the very center of the Parisian avant-garde scene, would become the stuff of legends—not least because of Stein’s most popular book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—though it was only later that Toklas would find her own voice as a food writer (with a legendary recipe for hash brownies, no less).
Maira Kalman, who illustrated a recent edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, explained that she was drawn to the project because of the relationship between the two writers. “Neither one of them could have flourished without the other,” she told Literary Hub. “They are eccentric, electric, artistic, domestic. Unique in so many ways. Determined. Unapologetically opinionated. The intersection of art and domesticity speaks to me as well—how do you create a grounded home as a jumping off point for your work? That is something that I have sought in my life.”
Toklas, the much less assuming (and much less famous) of the two, was often referred to as Stein’s “secretary-companion,” though by all accounts, Toklas had her own special power. “People have told me that when this small ugly woman was in a room they were keenly aware of her, before they even recognized her as Miss Toklas,” wrote M.F.K. Fisher in the foreword to a recent edition of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook. “She seemed to send out waves of inaudible sound, like bells clanging somewhere in another space than ours.” No wonder that Stein, in tune with many of the secret spaces of the world, instantly claimed that they would be together forever only a few minutes after they met. And in fact, they were: the two stayed together until Stein’s death in 1946. They are buried side by side in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery.
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MORE ON TOKLAS + STEIN
The Haunting of Alice B. Toklas
The US Tour That Made Gertrude Stein a Household Name
The Creative Communities That Changed Literature Forever
AN ARGUMENT FOR CLOSE ATTENTION
“I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading it never can do.”
–GERTRUDE STEIN
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
September 5, 2021 (lithub@lithub.com)