The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The narrative begins to recount Toklas and Stein’s life in Paris after Toklas moved into the rue de Fleurus residence. Prior to the move, Toklas resided in hotels and small apartments that she shared with a friend from California. Toklas helped Stein with the proofs of Three Lives and began to type The Making of Americans. When Toklas came to Paris there were very few Americans, but over the years, increasing numbers of them began to appear on Saturday nights at Stein’s residence.

Toklas’s place was to sit with the wives of geniuses while Stein and their husbands were occupied. Stein always liked “the adventure of a new” painter and told Toklas that “once everybody knows they are good the adventure is over” (74). The narrator argues that Cubism is an essentially Spanish movement. In Spanish villages, the houses were cube-shaped, and Picasso had the photographic evidence to prove it. Indeed, Stein argued that only Spaniards could be Cubists, and therefore the movement’s chief devotees were Picasso and Juan Gris, even if Frenchman Georges Braque was also a pioneer. Toklas recalls that in Spain, a place she and Stein revisited, even the postcards were inside cubes. This was the period of Picasso and Braque’s intimacy, and of Picasso’s beginning to make sculptural works as well as paintings.

Picasso and his long-term love Fernande ended their relationship after Fernande introduced Picasso to her friend Eve. Eve replaced Fernande as Picasso’s lover and muse, and he made a painting of her titled Ma Jolie. As a result, Fernande’s intimacy with Toklas and Stein came to an end.

Stein began to write textual portraits of the renowned people she knew, including Matisse and Picasso. A visit to Spain allowed Stein to produce the experimental work that eventually led to her book of prose poems, Tender Buttons (1914). Toklas passionately loved Spain and insisted to Stein that she wanted to stay in Avila forever. The pair wore Spanish clothing and were a source of fascination for local populations. They saw a Spanish dancer called Argentina, and Toklas learned to tolerate bullfights and view them as a ritual. In Granada, Stein’s writing interests evolved from wanting to express human psychology to conveying the visible world, and she remained “tormented by the problem of the external and the internal” (101).

Notable visitors to the house included members of the Bloomsbury group: Roger Fry, Clive Bell and his wife, Vanessa Bell (the British Modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s sister). Italian futurists, including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, also visited, but everyone found him boring. American Carl Van Vechten idolized Stein and accompanied her and Toklas to the infamous production of Vaslav Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913. The public was so offended that a riot broke out; however, Toklas admired both Nijinsky and the dancing.

When Stein’s brother announced that he was going to live in Florence, the siblings divided the pictures they had bought together, with Stein keeping the Cézannes and Picassos and her brother the Matisses and Renoirs. British publisher John Lane agreed to publish The Three Lives. Meanwhile, Toklas observed that Picasso had embarked on a melancholy period of his life, as he was living in Montparnasse rather than Montmartre. His friendship with Braque was on the wane, and he was now close only with Stein and the French writer Guillaume Apollinaire. By the spring and early summer of 1914, Toklas felt that the old way of life was over.