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The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a perfectly comprehensible, eminently readable memoir.* It has been approved by the bluestocking Atlantic Monthly (where part of it was serialized), and is sponsored by the Literary Guild. Though it is actually the autobiography of Ger- trude Stein, unwary readers might get all the way to the 310th and last page without discovering the mild hoax. For no author's name is on the title-page, and the book is written as if by Alice B. Toklas herself. But cognoscenti, even if they had not been forewarned by advance publicity, would recognize the circular motto on the book's cover—a signature as peculiar to Gertrude Stein as his famed butterfly was to Painter James Mcneill Whistler. The motto: Who & What is Gertrude Stein? "Widely ridiculed and seldom enjoyed," she is one of the least-read and most-publicized writers of the day. Her incom- prehensible sentences, in which an infuriating glimmer of shrewd sense or subacid humor is sometimes discernible, have generated the spark for many a journalistic wisecrack; except to the adventurous few who have been hardy enough to read her in the original (and to some of those) she has the reputation of a pure nonsense writer. To the man-in-the-street, she is the synonym for what Critic Max Eastman calls "the cult of unintelligibility." In man-in-the-street lingo, "Gert's poems are bunk."
Plain readers, who usually move up above street-level to do their book-reading, after reading Alice B. Toklas will find their faith in the limerick verdict sadly shaken, may begin to understand why Gertrude Stein's importance as a writer has received so many reiterated testimonials from writers of accredited sanity.
No fancy figment but a real live companion-secretary, Alice B. Toklas is a Californian (her father was a Pole) who has lived with Gertrude Stein for the last 26 years. Authoress Stein says she often urged Companion Toklas to write her autobiography, finally decided to do it for her. In the book's final sentences Gertrude Stein drops the thin disguise, says to Companion Toklas: "I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it." In Robinson Crusoe Defoe does not appear, but in Alice B. Toklas Gertrude Stein is nearly the whole show. When Miss Toklas, unattached spinster with artistic leanings, met Gertrude Stein in Paris (1907) she immediately recognized a genius. "I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken. . . ." (Other bell-ringers: Painter Pablo Picasso, Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead.) They set up house together, at No. 27 Rue de Fleurus, have been together ever since.