Gertrude & Alice: Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas - Softcover

Souhami, Diana

3.86

252 ratings by Goodreads

9781842120330: Gertrude & Alice: Gertrude Stein and Alice B.Toklas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1842120336 ISBN 13: 9781842120330

Publisher: Orion, 2000

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Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tokas were the talk of pre-war Paris. Photographed by Cecil Beaton and Man Ray, painted by Picasso and written about by Hemingway, they were at the heart of Parisian cultural and literary life.

Alice, convinced that Gertrude was a genius, cooked for her, typed her manuscripts and fought to obtain the fame she was convinced Gertrude was due. Alice said Gertrude was the happiest person she had ever known, and was besotted with her for the many years they were together. They were indomitable, charismatic, and wildly eccentric, driving around in �Auntie�, their Ford, with Basket, their cherished poodle.

Using letters, memoirs and the published writings of Gertrude and Alice, Diana Souhami has written a brilliant and witty chronicle of one of the happiest marriages in modern literary history.

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Review:

"Twentieth century literature is Gertrude Stein". Or at least so thought Gertrude Stein, a sentiment she shared with few others, except of course Alice B Toklas. Gertrude and Alice met in 1907 in Paris and famously shared their lives from that day forth, souls in perfect complement; two magnificently eccentric and idiosyncratic women who became a legendary entity, photographed by Man Ray and Cecil Beaton, painted and f�ted by Picasso and visited by writers such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Eliot. Theirs is a fascinating story, and they have found a wonderful and oddly sympathetic chronicler in Diana Souhami, whose book The Trials of Radclyffe Hall met with critical acclaim, and who proves the perfect counterfoil to the "Steins". Her own touch of genius is to barely consider Gertrude's grand oeuvre, sparing the rod to an already spoilt child and freeing her readership from the unpalatable fare she generally served up (by contrast, Alice was a dedicated and talented cook).

Literary success came late to Stein--she was 57 when The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published-- but like Edith Sitwell she became, to use a Leavis phrase, more a figure in the history of publicity, and the curious thing is that one senses that behind the rhetoric, she knew it. After her death in 1946, Alice became the classic devoted author's widow, finally dying just short of her 90th birthday. She was buried with Gertrude in P�re Lachaise cemetery, though her inscription is on the back of the tombstone, as ever behind her lover. Souhami's two lives, refreshingly stripped of biographical dead wood, positively crackle with high-powered gossip and bristle with bitchy anecdotes, though her laconic touch is never asleep to the touching cadences as well as the wonderful absurdities. As a writer, a "literary cubist", who once tried to give up nouns, Stein is more to be admired than respected. As a life force, a mover and shaker, and as a partner for Alice, she was massively successful. Their life together, a third life so to speak, was their greatest creation, and it's done justice by the talented Souhami's glorious account. Gertrude and Alice would have hated it. --David Vincent

Review:

'A brilliant and witty chronicle of one of the happiest marriages in modern literary history. Not only star-studded but light-filled.' --John Richardson, author of 'A Life of Picasso'

'Perfect, deadpan, brief and witty' --The Independent

'Wonderfully entertaining ... not many biographies can make you laugh out loud. A real treat' --Time Out

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