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Alice B. Toklas
Immediately following last week's SCOTUS ruling legalizing marriage equality nationwide, one of the best "celebration stories" was the Dallas, Texas gay couple that were finally married after
53 years of being together. While working on the No On One campaign in Maine in 2009, I'd met a few LGBT couples like Mr. Harris and Mr. Evans; couples that were "married" in every possible way but "name only."
But legal marriage is far more than a simple piece of paper naming a union; "marriage" is also a package of 1,138 statutory provisions that, to quote wikipedia, significantly determines "benefits, rights, and privileges" in matters of both life and death.
Dealing with the loss of a long-time husband/wife/life partner seems stressful enough. When one has to deal with the lack of legal recognition, as Alice Babette Toklas had to when her life partner of 39 years, Gertrude Stein, passed unexpectedly from stomach cancer July 27, 1946 at the age of 72, things can get even more tense sans legal protections (even with a will, as was the case with Stein's death). From Wikipedia:
Although Gertrude Stein had willed much of her estate to Toklas, including their shared art collection (some of them Picassos) housed in their apartment at 5, rue Christine, the couple's relationship had no legal recognition. As the paintings appreciated in value, Stein's relatives took action to claim them, eventually removing them from Toklas's residence while she was away on vacation and placing them in a bank vault. Toklas then relied on contributions from friends as well as writing to make a living.
Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with their poodle, Basket II
The claim could be made, I suppose, that without Gertrude Stein's fame as an architect of literary modernism, we may well have never heard of Alice B. Toklas. However, it's equally possible that without the partnership and love of Alice Toklas, we may well have never heard of Gertrude Stein, for, as Gilbert Harrison points out in his Introduction to
Staying on Alone, a collection of letters written by Alice Toklas after Stein's untimely death:
"...Alice marketed, cooked, gardened, walked the dogs, knitted gloves and blankets, embroidered rose is a rose is a rose, small as a dime, on handkerchiefs, transcribed Miss Stein's sloping penmanship into neatly typed pages, negotiated with printers, replied (signing herself A.B. Toklas) to inquiries about why Miss Stein wrote as she did, poured tea, sat with the wives of geniuses, and turned away the curious who came de la part de nobody" (Introduction pp. xi-xii)
There are a couple of fine diaries here at Daily Kos about the partnership (in every sense of the word) of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
There's this July 2012 diary by Dave in Northridge
There's also this Top Comments: Alice B. Toklas Edition (w/recipe) by Dragon5616...Yeah, it's THAT recipe
Haschich Fudge
Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of canibus [sic] sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties.... It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green.
Here, I will be dealing with Toklas' collection of letters,
Staying on Alone, dating from 1946 (Stein's death) to Toklas own death in 1967
The first "letter" in Staying on Alone is actually a telegram from Toklas to W.G. Rogers, then in New York City:
27 July 1946
Gertrude died this afternoon. I am writing. Dearest love
Alice
All the telegrams that I've ever read are short; in a way, telegrams remind me of Twitter with a measure of privacy.
But then I thought: What do you say or think when a life partner, a roommate, friend, lover, partner, dies unexpectedly after having been a couple for nearly 40 years?
And in spite of a number of letters in SOA from Toklas to Rogers, there's never a real sense that they are intimate in the way that that Toklas is intimate with, say, Carl Van Vechten (whom she and Stein called "Papa Woojums") or Samuel Steward, or even the Wilders.
The telegram seems to fit. In fact, it's probably what a tweet would say, nowadays
From the beginning of these letters, Toklas has a fine writing style but I have to admit to being a little irritated that after, say, the 1947 letters, of reading that "Gertrude thought..." or "Gertrude said..." on and on and on ad infinitium. Sure, these are personal letters and, in a sense, these letters were a way for Toklas to deal with the absence and loneliness in her life. But I suspected very early on that Toklas had a pretty distinctive voice of her own and in reading some of her art and literary criticism (i.e. her comments about Picasso's sculptures, her snarkiness about Jean-Paul Sartre) that she was, in a sense, fighting for a voice and found it to an extent but also realized and accepted that Stein would always be a significant part of her voice.
One has to note Toklas' June 1947 letter to Julian Sawyer, a literary reviewer that seemed to make much of the issue of what Toklas calls "sexuality" in Stein's work:
She would have emphatically denied it- she considered it the least characteristic of all expressions of her character-her actual references to sexuality are so rare- as on of Gertrude's staunchest defenders it should not lead to other errors SOA p.69(?)
I have to confess that in the Gertrude Stein pieces that I've read, I've never gotten much of a feeling that Stein felt anything about sexuality (straight, lesbian, or otherwise) but this did seem a bit vitriolic (though understandable).
Throughout SOA, there are scores of people known (Thornton Wilder) and unknown; footnotes regarding various people, places, and things go a long way to clarifying everything (especially important events like the tense and stressful situation regarding the shipping of Picasso's painting of Stein to the Metropolitan Museum of Art).
I'm now nearing the end of this book and I am quite grateful that I read Staying On Alone.
Because now, more than ever, I do regard Alice Babette Toklas as very much of a person and an author in her own right and not simply as the widow of a great American author.
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