When The Washington Post put this book on their list of the ten best for the year, I was interested, and it has turned out to be a great read for me. Stein was born in 1874 and was raised in Oakland, California in a wealthy family. Her parents died when she was young, but her older brother successfully invested the family money and sent money to the siblings. Gertrude attended Radcliffe and studied with William James. In 1902 she and her brother Leo moved to Paris and they began collecting the art of Picasso, Cézanne, and Matisse and became friends with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. Alice B. Toklas moved in with them in 1911 and after three years Leo moved out.
Stein was well known for her connection to the modern artists and writers in Paris, but was determined to become recognized for her own writing, that was in fact too opaque for wide public acceptance. Toklas devoted her life to supporting Stein however she could and that included suppressing her own interests. Stein convinced her she could write nothing, not even a cookbook. Their 40 years together included lovely times and the terrible years of World War II, especially frightening for two Jewish lesbians in rural France.
The plentiful material about Stein’s work was due to her sending papers to the Yale archive over the years and appointing a literary executor before she died in 1946. Tolklas lived another twenty-one years and continued to promote Stein’s work. She did publish a cookbook in 1954.
Years after Stein’s death a young scholar named Leon Katz became devoted to her work. Most notably he spent five months and enough charm to successfully convince Toklas to reveal information that adds much to understanding the effect of their relationship on Stein’s work. He promised that he would not publish her notebooks or his notes until Toklas’ death and he was true to his word. In fact his notes were not available until after his death. This author is the first to have access to his notes.
I have yet to read anything by Stein, though like many, I know “A rose is a rose is a rose,” that she said, “There is no there there” about Oakland, and that her most successful work was the nearly conventional The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. That said, I was intrigued by these two women and their strange connection. The author says that it was Toklas’ discovery of old manuscripts that revealed to her that Stein had been in love with a woman named May Bookstaver before they met. Learning that made her so angry that Stein wrote The Autobiography that acknowledged Tolklas’ importance in Stein’s writing life to mollify her. Another shocking bit was that in one manuscript Stein was forced to change every use of the word “may” to something else, often rendering the sentence awkward or worse.
This is a book that examines both the subject’s own myth-making work during her life and that of her partner’s work after she died. The “afterlife” in the title is the work done by Toklas to keep Stein’s work before the public. Wade writes about the effort she made and the rich trove of materials biographers use to bring a subject to light and in this case it was both plentiful and tightly controlled. What an interesting book.
Frances Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife, Scribner, 2025, 471 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.