42 pages • 1 hour read
Gertrude SteinA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics.
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco, California. Her ancestors included a pioneer who came to California in 1849 and a colonel for the French conqueror Napoleon. However, Toklas had a more pacific temperament, preferring art, music, and domestic pursuits. As a girl, she admired the novelist Henry James and even wrote to him, saying that she wanted to dramatize his novel The Awkward Age. Until the age of 20, Toklas was a serious music practitioner; however, the death of her mother caused her to realize that the piano was not her true passion. Similarly, while Toklas felt her young adult life in San Francisco was “reasonably full,” she was “not very ardent in it” (3).
Her life changed course permanently after the San Francisco fire, when Gertrude Stein’s elder brother Leo and his wife returned to the city from Paris. Toklas was transfixed by the three Matisse paintings Mrs. Stein had brought and her stories of Paris. She told her father she was going to go to Paris. When Toklas met Gertrude Stein there, she was impressed by her voice and her “genius” and began to form her new life around it (4).
Toklas describes her initial encounters with Stein and the artists who surrounded her. She remembers coming to Stein’s place, 27 rue de Fleurus, for dinner. Before dinner, Stein took Toklas to an atelier where she saw paintings so intimidatingly strange that she could not bear to look at them. Stein was so used to such a response that she remained nonchalant. The paintings, which in the 1900s were illuminated by gaslights, included the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Entry to the atelier was open, as long as guests could provide the name of the person who had invited them.
Toklas met Picasso and his then sweetheart Fernande Olivier and was immediately impressed by Picasso’s powers of observation. Meanwhile, Picasso painted a portrait of Stein and claimed that Stein would increasingly grow to look like the picture.
Toklas imagined that she would write a book titled “The wives of geniuses I have sat with” (12), reflecting her role of repeatedly entertaining the consorts of the great men who visited Stein. In the early years, Toklas spent much time with Fernande, who was beautiful but shallow. Looking forward in time, Toklas insists that Picasso and Stein continued to regard each other with mutual tenderness, despite the changes in their relationship.
After the first dinner at Stein’s, Toklas and a friend went to the salon indépendent, which hosted the avant-garde art that had been rejected by the official academy and which was prone to scandals due to the daringness of the works exhibited. The salon occupied a temporary building at that time and was later replaced by the Grand Palais. At the event, Stein asked Toklas and her friend to take French lessons to help Fernande, who had separated from Picasso. Meanwhile, Toklas was amazed at the number of men looking at the pictures because in San Francisco, art was considered a female pastime.
About 10 days later, Toklas and Stein went to Montmartre. Toklas remembers going to Picasso’s studio and seeing him in his monkey painter’s overalls—so called because his unfastened belt hung down his back like a monkey’s tail. Toklas found Picasso’s pictures strange but also believed they conveyed powerful feelings of beauty, pain, and entrapment. Picasso remarked that the process of making avant-garde works was so complex that they were always ugly, but after a while, the public grows accustomed to them as new forms of beauty. Picasso liked Toklas so much that he gave her a drawing.
Toklas closes the chapter by stating that she and Stein, two Americans, chanced to be at the center of an art movement the world knew nothing about.
The first two chapters introduce Toklas as a quietly determined presence. Unlike her ancestor who “raised a regiment” for the French military dictator Napoleon (3), Toklas was averse to violence and preferred the domestic arts of needlework and gardening. In fact, her temperament and preferences made her the perfect wife by early 20th-century standards. Although the law at the time prevented two women from marrying, she became an analogous figure as Stein’s life companion who supported her work.
These chapters show that Toklas had artistic promise of her own: the first two decades of her life were devoted to mastering the piano in the style of her mother. However, when Toklas gave up her instrument after her mother’s death, she realized that the impetus to play was inherited rather than personal. The first decision she made for herself was going to Paris and being at the center of the artistic movements that inspired her. She chose Stein as much as Stein chose her, being impressed in equal measure by Stein’s taste and her intellectual ability.
Stylistically, this early part of the autobiography is factual and based on hearsay rather than an examination of Toklas’s interior life. This implies that Stein concentrated on the information she learned from her lover’s speech and behavior rather than attempting to penetrate her mind and feelings. Although the narrative is mostly chronological, there are departures, such as when Toklas reflects on her experience from a future vantage. For example, when Toklas says, “I have met many important people, I have met several great people but I have only known three first class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something rang” (4), she is evaluating her experiences over time. The repetition of the phrase “I have met” is a rhetorical flourish that resembles a formal speech and suggests that Toklas expressed these sentiments often before Stein. The idea of an internal bell ringing at the recognition of genius shows Toklas’s inclination to pay attention to and devote herself to people whom she considered more talented than herself. This made her a natural companion to the wives of the male geniuses who came to visit Stein. For her part, Stein the writer uses Toklas as a mouthpiece to confirm her own brilliance and alleviate her insecurities about the critical reception of her work.
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