EVERYBODY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY — Gertrude Stein—Random House ($3).
When The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas became a best seller (1933), Gertrude Stein discovered that it was ''very nice being a celebrity a real celebrity who can decide who they want to meet and say so and they come or do not come as you want them." She also discovered that she liked to make money ("Just at present my passion is avarice"), that she loved the U. S., loved to lecture, liked photographers, reporters, liked to see her name in electric lights on Times Square. When she sailed for the U. S., after a 30-year absence, with her companion, Alice B. Toklas, she enjoyed getting a luxurious stateroom on the Champlain for less than the price of a small one, as one of the privileges of fame. "People always had been nice to me," she confesses, "because I am pleasing but now this was going to be a different thing."
Last week she described just how different it was. Her 318-page volume was crowded with characteristic Gertrude Stein incoherencies, lucid passages about herself and Miss Toklas. malicious portraits of other celebrities, scrambled philosophical observations, comments on history, drunks, dogs,, revolutions, writing, painting, genius, the Stein family, the U. S. landscape—and, above all, "about is money money or isn't money money."
In her earlier work (Tender Buttons, The Making of Americans) Miss Stein apparently put down whatever irrelevancies popped into her head as she began to write, without explaining their connection and without suggesting why they occurred to her. But in Everybody's Autobiography, as in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she is more considerate of her readers, explains as she leaps from subject to subject why she does so. As a result, the book strongly suggests a fireside monologue delivered by a strong-minded, original lady who is unfortunately unable to keep on the subject, who nods and dozes, forgets where she left off, but drops enough unexpected observations to hold the attention of her audience.
First part of Everybody's Autobiography gives a picture of the Stein-Toklas household in Paris; the second describes Miss Stein's inability to recapture contentment in the French village of Bilignin after she had become a success; the third tells of the U. S. journey. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas brought old literary-artistic quarrels to a head. Miss Stein began reading the manuscript to Artist Pablo Picasso and his wife: "I was reading he was listening and his eyes were wide open and then suddenly his wife Olga Picasso got up and said she would not listen she would go away she said. What's the matter, we said, I do not know that woman she said and left. Pablo said go on reading. I said no you must go after your wife, he said oh I said oh. and he left and until this year ... we did not see each other again but now he has left his wife and we have seen each other again."