Books: A Salute to Gertrude Stein

WHAT Is REMEMBERED (186 pp.)—Alice B. Toklas—Holt, Rineharf & Winston ($4).

"About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe." In six weeks Gertrude completed The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It had almost nothing to say about its subject and a great deal to say about Gertrude Stein, but at least it was intelligible; when it appeared 30 years ago, it became a surprise bestseller and gave its author the fame she had always wanted. Now, 17 years after Author Stein's death, Alice B. Toklas has at last written her own autobiography with her own hand. Predictably but a little pathetically, it reads like Gertrude Stein.

Author Toklas, who is now 85, and still living in Paris, grew up in "necessary luxury" in a wealthy Jewish family in San Francisco. She dabbled in the arts, and for a time considered a career as a concert pianist. But in her late 205, she met Michael Stein, older brother of Gertrude, and swiftly learned from him about cultural activity in Paris; she sailed for France in 1907. Within a few days of her arrival in Paris she met Gertrude and knew immediately that she was in the presence of a genius.

That estimate survived through the 39 years she was with Gertrude and has endured the "empty" years since her death. While Gertrude wrote and talked, Alice ran the household, typed the manuscripts, cared for the dogs, screened the visitors and tended the vegetable gardens that they planted almost anywhere the two of them lived. She knitted the shapeless woolen garments and heavy woolen stockings Gertrude favored. She seems, in fact, to have disappeared virtually without a trace into Gertrude Stein's life. The reader never learns, for instance, what became of her father (her mother died when she was young) or her younger brother. After her departure from San Francisco back in 1907, she returned only once — and that was with Gertrude Stein on a lecture tour in 1935.

There is much of the comings and goings of the devoted admirers — Braque. Virgil Thomson, Lytton Strachey, Edith Sitwell, Ezra Pound. Ford Madox Ford and, of course, the young Hemingway —who sat in the atelier at 27 Rue de Fleurus reverently listening to the voice that Alice Toklas can still plainly hear — "deep, full, velvety like a great contralto's." She heard it last in a hospital room shortly before Gertrude was wheeled away for an operation that she did not survive: "By this time Gertrude Stein was in a sad state of indecision and worry. I sat next to her and she said to me early in the afternoon, what is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question?"

Alice Toklas did not know. What Is Remembered is the sad, slight book of a woman who all her life has looked in a mirror and seen somebody else.