Autobiography Alice Toklas Successful

autobiography Alice Toklas successful?

The success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

According to Time Magazine's review of the 100 Best Books of All Time: "Writing her lover's 'autobiography' proved a witty way for American author Gertrude Stein to detail her own life as Parisian writer, salon host and arts patron. Ostensibly, readers can take in the book, published in 1933, as Stein writing about Alice B. Toklas (which is what the title suggests) or as Toklas 'writing' about Stein (which is what the book actually is)" (Sun 2011). Regardless, in contrast to Stein's usual dense, difficult prose, the book has a wittier and more story-driven narrative. Many have called it 'Stein for Beginners' to explain its subsequent popularity (Sun 2011).

The 'gossipy' aspects of reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas should not be dismissed in terms of its ability to attract a wide audience, given that it contains anecdotes of Stein's contemporaries, including Picasso, Hemingway and Matisse (Sun 2011). The desire to be part of this literary scene was undeniably an important factor in the work's popularity. Yet this collage of voices and visions of others served a purpose, and was not designed with the intent of name-dropping, but to honor Stein's larger literary project, to deconstruct the very nature of autobiography. "With The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein radically alters the history of autobiography. Stein effects the shift to modernist autobiography by eschewing the romantic conception of the self -- a set of feelings and internal motives -- to construct herself as a modernist work of art, a collage of multiple identities, a multi-perspectival 'Master-piece'" (Burros 1999). Instead of a self that exists outside of society, Stein asserts that social constructions create the self, hence the blending of Alice's persona and hers into one. "The Autobiography alongside Toklas's The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book…function as a "network of 'intertexts' that 'require a notion of the 'true story' as a radically relative category that is necessarily multiple, provisional, and ever shifting" yet still manage to be accessible to the average reader who desires a 'story' with 'dialogue' he or she is able to follow in a linear fashion (Rumbarger 2009). In making her modernist prose more accessible, Stein increased the audience for her work and made the conventions of modernism more acceptable for other writers to use in literature intended for a mass audience. Stein democratized modernism and deflated the notion of the author as a special, removed, and objective observer.

However, Stein was not 'above' a certain amount of glamorization of herself as a writer, and using her lover as her mouthpiece enabled her to show herself in a positive light at times, without seeming egocentric. For example, Stein was famously the subject of a portrait by Pablo Picasso. Produced during his Cubist period, the work made Stein's face look like a series of geometric shapes or an Iberian mask. In one scene in the Autobiography, "seated next to Picasso, who was flustered at having arrived late, Toklas tried to calm him down by murmuring that she liked his painting of Gertrude Stein...Stein records Picasso's response to Toklas: 'Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.' & #8230;Stein wrote, 'I was and still am satisfied with my portrait, for me it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me'" (Lewis 2012).