A YEAR WITH ALICE B. TOKLAS
2012; Wiley; Volume: 100; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2012.0035
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)American Literature and Culture
Resumo1 R A Y E A R W I T H A L I C E B . T O K L A S L E O N K A T Z Back in 1936, Thornton Wilder had warned Gertrude Stein that sheshouldgetherunpublishedmanuscriptsintothesafekeepingof the Yale library because of the danger of another world war breaking out on French soil. Charmed by the notion that all her work was to be safely harbored for later publication and study, Stein packed several cases of manuscripts, letters, and miscellany and sent them o√. The packing was done with characteristic Steinian abandon: neatly piled manuscripts were dumped into crates, and correspondence , carefully alphabetized and filed at the end of each year by Stein’s amanuensis Alice B. Toklas, was pulled out in drawerfuls and overturned into the crates. Finally, all the scraps of paper that Stein never threw away – budget lists, garage attendants’ instructions about the Fords she owned during the teens and twenties (‘‘regardez le carburetor’’), forgotten old dentists’ bills – were tossed in too. Toklas remonstrated about their inclusion, but Stein used every hoarder’s excuse: ‘‘You can never tell whether some laundry list might not be the most important thing.’’ Two packages in brown wrapping paper at the bottom of the armoire, lying among chunks of manuscript of her novel The Making of Americans, fell into the crates along with all the other papers. 2 K A T Z Y Stein had forgotten what they contained, and Toklas had never seen them and merely assumed they were part of the manuscript. Unidentified and a mess, they lay in the library’s custody uncatalogued and unexplored. Sifted through almost a decade later, they unveiled Stein’s only remaining unpublished text – her notebooks . Never intended to be seen by anyone but their author, they were scrawled with little care for decipherable handwriting or the sometimes injudicious nature of their contents. But the labor of assembling and organizing the notebooks opened sluice gates to the existence of a largely unknown Gertrude Stein. Much of the Stein carefully concealed in her autobiographies is revealed plainly and sometimes unpleasantly in the notebooks. And they include the story of her struggles with friendships, with loves, and with the private self-judgment out of which she gradually built her understanding of human nature, of herself, and of writing. Fathoming and clarifying that story became my devotion for a long, long time. There were first, of course, many interviews with surviving American relatives and friends in Baltimore, San Francisco, and New York (some still warmly remembering, some barely overcoming old antipathies), archival research, and then, thankfully, a Ford Foundation grant to go to Paris for talks with Toklas, then in her seventies, who could still, sometimes piously, sometimes less than piously, remember. We spent a year together – during four particularly intensive months meeting four days a week, never less than eight hours each day – Alice talking about her profoundly beloved Gertrude, and I reading aloud, note by note, the gathered text, while she, unflagging , adumbrated. For Alice, who had never typed or even seen these notes – Gertrude’s private memoranda – there were revelations ; for myself, of course, incredible days of listening to and watching and recording the little gnome that was left of a woman Gertrude had thought in those early years a beautiful one. Our sessions commenced in November 1952 in dingy Paris six years after the end of the war. De Gaulle hadn’t yet managed to get all the city’s buildings – still covered in blankets of soot – cleaned up. Even the hallways of the city’s buildings, even those of the reasonably well-to-do, were still untouched, some odoriferous. But once you shut the hall door of apartments like Alice Toklas’s, you came into a world that needed none of De Gaulle’s urgings to A Y E A R W I T H A L I C E B . T O K L A S 3 R obliterate, finally, the war’s e√ects. Alice was not living at 27 rue de Fleurus, which Gertrude had shared with her brother Leo, the legendary address at which the Saturday evening salons were held...
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