1967 It was a lovely spring day in Paris. When he called before noon on Gertrude Stein at her legendary flat at 27 rue de Fleurus, the maid gave Ernest Hemingway a glass of eau-de-vie. ‘The colorless alcohol felt good on my tongue’, he recalled in A Moveable Feast (1964), his memoir of life in Paris in the 1920s, ‘and it was still in my mouth when I heard someone speaking to Miss Stein as I have never heard one person speak to another; never, anywhere, ever’:
Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’
He made his excuses and left without seeing the great woman again, and that, as he put it, was ‘The way it ended with Miss Stein’. They had been friends, had respected each other’s work. He knew Alice B. Toklas as Gertrude Stein’s ‘companion’. Can this really have been the first time he realised that she was also her lover? Or was it the shock of such an august figure being humiliated that ended their friendship – out of embarrassment, as it were? But then, as she once told him: ‘Hemingway, after all you are ninety percent Rotarian.’
That last comment is reported in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), written by Stein, not Toklas. Toklas’s real autobiography is spread out over two works – The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (1954), which is only partly a cookbook since it contains as many personal reminiscences as it does recipes, and What is Remembered (1963), a moving memoir of their life together and the people they knew – soberly written, informative, and testimony to a deep mutual love, whatever occasional spats might have erupted along the way.
The books are shot through with ironic gaps between publicity, reputation and literary value. The cookbook is one of the best-selling cookbooks ever, mainly due to a much-celebrated recipe for ‘Haschich [sic] Fudge’, which wasn’t even Toklas’s own, but given to her by a friend. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was a great commercial success. Though predictably disliked by Hemingway, it was actually a clever narrative manoeuvre, in that it tried to relate events as Toklas would have told them. Meanwhile, Stein’s own most original narrative experiments – Three Lives (1909), the ground-breakingly modernist Tender Buttons (1914), and the monumental The Making of Americans (1925) – have gone largely unread. Big mistake.