#238 | Go Behind the Scenes with Picasso, Hemingway, and Early 20th Century Paris in Gertrude Stein’s Unusual AutoBiography from Her Partner's Eyes
Quick SUMMARY:
Douglas Vigliotti discusses Gertrude Stein's "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” highlighting Stein's life, her literary contributions, and the vibrant artistic community of early 20th-century Paris. Vigliotti delves into the book's unique perspective, written from Toklas's viewpoint, and its structure covering pre-war, wartime, and post-war periods. He reflects on Stein's relationship with Toklas, the book's self-referential nature, and its engaging, almost tabloid-like quality on the lives of great artists and writers like Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and more.
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TOPICS COVERED IN the EPISODE:
Introduction to the Episode (00:09) - Douglas introduces the podcast and the featured book, "The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas."
Promotion of Douglas's Book (01:07) - He briefly discusses his book, "Aristotle for Novelists," and its relevance to storytelling.
About Gertrude Stein (01:50) - Douglas shares insights about Gertrude Stein and her literary contributions.
Stein's Influence and Salon (02:17) - Discussion of Stein's role as a tastemaker in early 20th-century Paris and her legendary salon gatherings.
Alice B. Toklas's Role (04:47) - Exploration of Toklas's life with Stein and her significant influence in the autobiography.
Structure of the Autobiography (07:03) - Douglas outlines the three parts of the autobiography: pre-war, wartime, and post-war.
Art and Picasso's Portrait (08:03) - He describes the iconic portrait of Stein by Picasso and the story behind it.
Takeaway on Stein's Writing Style (10:08) - Douglas reflects on the egotistical nature of Stein's writing and its self-referential qualities.
Tabloid-like Quality of the Book (11:23) - He discusses the engaging, gossip-like tone of the autobiography that appeals to readers.
Nuggets of Wisdom for Creatives (12:28) - Douglas highlights valuable advice for artists within the book, emphasizing appreciation over criticism.
Closing Remarks (13:44) - He thanks listeners, encourages subscriptions, and reminds them of his book and podcast resources.
READ THE TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back to “Books for Men”, a podcast to inspire more men to read and bring together men who do. So this week I have a piece of nonfiction to share with you. It is an autobiography, but not like one you've ever read before, probably. It is called “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”, and it's by Gertrude Stein. It came out in the 30s, so 1933. It clocks in at around 320 pages or so. But I will get into all about the book, the author, and some of my larger takeaways in just a moment. First, as always, I just wanted to remind you about my new book that is out “Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story”. If you're interested in telling a story in any shape or form, whether it's on the page, or on the screen in your life, perhaps we are all telling a story in some fashion, and I think you will find some relevance in that book. So if you're interested in finding out more about it, all you have to do is visit the website AristotleforNovelists.com.
01:07 - All right. So now let me turn back to the work at hand. So the author Gertrude Stein, has written many books. You may have heard some of them before “Three Lives”, “The Making of Americans”, and “Tender Buttons”. She even wrote this fun little book on Picasso titled “Picasso”. She wrote a real autobiography called “Everybody's Autobiography”, which features probably her most famous quotes like, “A rose is a rose is a rose”, which means things are what they are, or “There is not there there,” meaning something that lacks substance. These are quotes that you may find pasted on people's coffee mugs or sweatshirts or I don't know. They seem to have penetrated popular culture in some fashion and you're liable to see them pop up. But anyway, let me not get too off the beaten path here. That all came much later. None of the books that I had mentioned brought her the acclaim in attention that the book that I am sharing with you today did “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”. And although she prided herself on being a writer, something that she writes in the book and she's writing about herself, which is something I will talk about momentarily.
02:17 - But she says, “She is passionately addicted to what the French call métier, and she contends that one can only have one metier, as one can only have one language. Her metier is writing in her language.” Is English so similar to an episode a couple of weeks ago with Charlie Munger? She also believes in having a well-defined circle of competence. She calls it meteor or the French call it that. I hope I'm not mispronouncing that. So she indeed felt very strongly about the fact that she was a writer, but the thing that she was probably most known for was being sort of this tastemaker type of figure in early 1900s Paris, and this is sort of what made her this cult literary hero as the years went on. So, as legend has it, her salon, which she called it, which was her home at 27 rue de Fleurus, and I apologize if I am butchering the French pronunciation of some of these words. I actually visited the site when I was in Paris. It's a little street by Luxembourg Gardens in what I believe is the sixth arrondissement on the left bank of Paris.
03:30 - Anyway, the parties and social gatherings that she would host at this apartment have now become legendary, and it really helped, if not spawned, the careers of definitely aid the careers of many artists. But one of the interesting things that is actually shared in this book is the catch to be allowed into the party, she writes in the book. “The idea was that anybody could come, but for form's sake. And in Paris, you have to have a formula. Everybody was supposed to be able to mention the name of somebody who told them about it.” So basically you just had to know somebody who knew about these parties, and that's how you got in. As I mentioned, there are just so many iconic artists who attended these parties painters like Picasso, Matisse, Marie Laurencin, and Braque, they were all mostly pre-war. And then there was the post-war crowd, which in came the Americans, as they talk about in this book. And it was Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Fitzgerald. And before I get carried away with anything further, I should probably tell you a little bit about what this book is about, because it all leads to many of the things that I just started to tell you about.
04:47 - So in short, this is Gertrude Stein writing as her life partner Alice B. Tolkas, who was by her side every step of the way in Paris for all those years. So something like 35, 40 years. Interestingly, Toklas met Stein on her first day in Paris. This is something that is documented in the book. So imagine that the first day you move somewhere, you meet the person that you're going to spend the rest of your life with pretty remarkable and crazy in its own right. As you might have figured out already, there is a lot of unusual things about this memoir or autobiography, I should say, mostly because the person who it's about isn't actually writing it. So maybe it's actually a biography. Having said that, Toklas played an integral part in the life of Stein, as someone might conclude. But not just that, during the salon parties, Alice would be responsible for hosting and entertaining the wives in the other rooms. It's funny, at the end of the book, there's this little passage that tells you how this autobiography came to be.
05:53 - And Stein writes, and remember, she's writing about herself. She's talking about Stein. “She began to tease me and say that I should write my autobiography. Just think she would say what a lot of money you would make. She then began to invent titles for my autobiography, My Life with the Great Wives of Geniuses. I have sat with my 25 years with Gertrude Stein,” and then she continues on. “When Ford Madox Ford was editing the Transatlantic Review, he once said to Gertrude Stein, I'm a pretty good writer, and I'm a pretty good editor and a pretty good businessman, but I find it very difficult to be all three at once. I am a pretty good housekeeper and a pretty good gardener, and a pretty good needle woman, and a pretty good secretary, and a pretty good editor, and a pretty good vet for dogs. And I have to do them all at once. And I found it difficult to add being a pretty good author.” And so I found this quote to be very amusing, because of course, Stein then wrote the autobiography for her, and it's pretty much noted historically that she did it for money, like she says in this quote.
07:03 - But I will get into all that in just a moment. So I should just mention quickly that the book sets up in really what I would consider to be three parts mainly, and that's pre-war war and after-war. So World War I is the war that I'm referencing. You had the pre-war time period, which was like the painters with Picasso, Matisse, and all of the people that I mentioned earlier. And then during the war, it was kind of like this depressing part of the autobiography and actually documents Apollinaire dying at war, which is another thing that is interesting. And then after the war, there's the more literary component that takes place with Hemingway and all of the people I mentioned before. But I found this book really just super fascinating, which was funny to me because I delayed reading it for so long. And that's mostly because the print version that I had, the type was so tiny. So I want to make sure everyone is aware that if you ordered this book off Amazon, you might get a book that's only 176 pages.
08:03 - And I mentioned at the top of this, that's around 320. So you could imagine how small the print would have to be to reduce a book by 50%. Nonetheless, that's the version that I read and why it took me so long to read it. But there's just so much in here about great artists and all these historical touchpoints that I found it so grasping as soon as I started to read it. I mean, just as an example, there's a whole section talking about the now iconic painting of Gertrude Stein done by Picasso, and she talks about how she posed for it for 90 days, and she would walk up to Montmartre, and which was a section of Paris that is pretty far away from where she lived. and she'd pose, and then she'd walk all the way back home. And that would go on and on and on. And there's this really fun quote from Picasso in the book, and she writes, “After a little while, I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it, but that does not make any difference. She will, he said.”
09:10 - And there's just so many of these great little quotes and things like this peppered throughout this book that make it wildly entertaining. If you are at all interested in the artists of this time period. So as always, I've already started to share probably some of my larger takeaways, but I will end this episode by sharing three more or three specific ones, the first being about the form, which is obviously something that sticks out like a sore thumb. And to me, it was probably the most egotistical thing that I've ever read. I mean, she's writing about herself. In the first opening pages, there's this quote where she writes, “I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius. In each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken. And I may say, in each case, it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Alfred Whitehead.”
10:15 - So there are all these things in this book where Stein is writing about herself, and most of them are very flattering and some aren't. And I will say that she does juxtapose what appears pretty clearly on its face to be self-aggrandizing with her struggles as a writer specifically trying to get work published, and her dissatisfaction with not being able to get things published, and the struggles that she went through to have any of her work published and not be recognized and have all of these great artists around her being recognized. And, you know, that was a really interesting aspect of this book. And also just I found it a little bit sweet as the fact that she wrote this book for her life partner, and it did bring more acclaim and notoriety to Alice B. Tolkas. Considering that she was a very important figure in the life of Stein and this time period, I thought that this was a nice way to elevate that, even if it is still the most egotistical thing that I've ever read.
11:23 - By no means does that mean I don't think you should read it, because this leads me perfectly into the takeaway. Number two, the book has this tabloid-like feel to it, I would say. Or it's maybe better said as a friend who was dishing on everyone, and I think that this is probably why it sold so well because it had this quality. You're sort of getting the inside scoop on all of these artistic icons, you know, stuff like what their lives were like and all their personal preferences on who they like and who they don't like, or who's overrated and who isn't. Tolkas is famously noted for hating Hemingway, so to speak, whereas Gertrude Stein had a soft spot for them. There's even this part in the book where she writes, “But what a story. That of the real Hem, and one he should tell himself. But alas, he never will. After all, as he himself once murmured, there is the career, the career.” So she's alluding to the idea that perhaps there's more to this man than meets the eye.
12:28 - And who would know better than them? They were actually the godparents of his firstborn. And so all of this is shared in this book, along with the third and final takeaway to wrap this up. And that is, there's just so many great nuggets for creative people in here. So if you are a writer, a painter, a filmmaker, a songwriter, I don't know anything at all. There are so many nuggets of advice and things that you can think about. Perhaps my favorite comes toward the end of the book. And again, this is Stein writing as Toklas. So she's writing about herself. “As Stein always contends, no artist needs criticism. He only needs appreciation. If he needs criticism, he is no artist.” What a hard-hitting quote to end this with one that I like. So I'm going to end this episode there. I want to thank you so much for listening and remind you that if you enjoyed this episode to please click the subscribe button on whatever podcast platform you're listening to this on, or double down on that support by taking two seconds to rate this podcast, because either one of those two things helps this podcast immeasurably in achieving its mission, which is to inspire more men to read.
13:44 - If you want to let me know what you thought about this podcast, whether this episode specifically or the podcast more broadly, there are two ways to get in touch with me. Either find me on Instagram @DouglasVigliotti. It's the only social media that I have, or contact me through my website DouglasVigliotti.com. As a reminder, I do have a new book out. It is called “Aristotle for Novelists” and you can find more about that on the website Aristotle orNovelists.com. Last but not least, I wanted to remind you that if you want more information on this podcast, which includes signing up for the monthly newsletter, then all you have to do is head over to the website BooksforMen.org.
