World: Together Again

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Their Left Bank apartment was the living room of the Lost Generation. Through it passed every star in the artistic firmament between the two World Wars—Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Picasso and Matisse, T. S. Eliot and Sherwood Anderson, Ford Madox Ford and Carl Van Vechten. Three generations of young writers came for guidance to the Paris salon of Gertrude Stein and her lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas. Novelists, composers, poets, painters and playwrights sipped the fragrant colorless liqueurs of the two U.S.-born hostesses (which they made themselves from plums and raspberries), dined on such Toklas specialties as Bass for Picasso and argued for hours over cubism, symbolism and the other innovations of the day.

The artists came and went, but the two women remained inseparable. Let Miss Stein's mannish and serene face appear at a café, and there beside her was sure to be found the birdlike Miss Toklas, with her large, darting eyes and determined mouth. The relationship between the two women lasted for more than 39 years, until Miss Stein succumbed to cancer in 1946. Last week, 20 years after the loss of her devoted friend, death came in Paris to Alice Boyd Toklas, 89.

A Golden Glint. Like Miss Stein, Alice Toklas came from a Jewish background and moved in a wealthy orbit in San Francisco. She considered a career as a concert pianist. Then, at the age of 30, she first laid eyes on Gertrude Stein in Paris. "She was a golden-brown presence," Alice wrote later, "burned by the Tuscan sun and with a golden glint in her warm brown hair." Together they soon set up house on the Rue de Fleurus. While Gertrude labored over her hypnotic experiments with words—the most famous being "Rose is a rose is a rose"—Alice served as cook, gardener and faithful companion. At night she often needlepointed designs given her by Picasso, or gossiped with the wives and mistresses of the great and near-great while Gertrude talked on serious topics with their husbands.

One of Gertrude Stein's most widely read works was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is really about Gertrude and their famous circle as seen through Alice's eyes. Prankishly, the final page explains that Gertrude wrote the autobiography because Alice was too busy to do it herself. Was Alice then a mere alter ego to Stein? Hemingway implied that Toklas at times henpecked Stein, described her in The Moveable Feast as a "frightening" person who on one occasion said things to Stein that were "too bad to hear"; Alice cordially hated him in return. Actually, as Thornton Wilder tells it, "Alice was merely the dragon protecting the treasure." She had enough intuition to recognize Gertrude Stein's talent and made a life work out of nourishing it. She was not just a factotum for Gertrude. She frequently made changes in Stein's writings, and her brevity and staccato conversation were an important counterweight to Stein's discursive, convoluted style.