Stein’s management as an arbitrator was backed up by ambiguously gender seduction. In her opinion, the genius was a male line, and she felt that her own genius was men. After she cut her hair, friends noticed her resemblance to the Roman emperor. Her bull head was strong at the top of a magnificent massive silhouette, and her clothes – Chinese clothes and velvet caftans – express her a shamanic aura. But if Blie's grandeur was Stein’s armor, there was a click in it. In anticipation of being immortalized, she desperately wanted her to be understood, if only she wrote to one ideal reader – some who “say yes” – and in 1907 she met her.
Alisa Babett Toklas, an ideal reader who became Stein's wife, made a name for herself by writing a witty culinary book, which included a friend's recipe for hash. She also lent her name to “Autobiography by Alice B. Toklas”, a bestseller in ventrinism, the gossip of celebrities and self -promotion from Gertrude Stein. Like the penthausical comedies of depression, he turned to the public living in difficult times, with its glamorous atmospheres and naughty characters – operetta of artists and their mistresses. In 1934, a year after the publication of the book, its main characters went to a six -month lecture tour of the United States, where crowds and reporters welcomed them at each stop.
You might think that in Central America this strange couple would be rejected as deviants, but ordinary people did not seem shocked, that two patrician spinsters should share the house. In many ways, it was an old -fashioned marriage. Stein privately called Toklax the “precious wife” and signed himself “a little hubby”. In one of my favorite offers from Autobiography, the puppet puppet Alice reports that Gertrude “always says that she does not like abnormal, it is so obvious.” The irony lies in the fact that Stein's emphasis on the subordination of Alice and her own superiority as the Great Zapon (she boasted that she never raised a finger for herself) dramatized their deviation. Mira readers should have wondered what actually continued when the genius and their wives went home after dinner.
Stein’s last biographer, Francesca Wade, gradually, this is reasonable question in the second half of Gertrude Stein: afterlife, which begins after the death of Stein, in 1946. (The first half, a bright, but compressed report on her life, does not violate much new grounds. Wade's initial study belongs to the “Katz interview”. Leon Katz was a graduate student of Talmudic zeal, and Stein’s texts were his target. But the story that he learned is more new: the intrigue of Jamesanskaya, in which the intrigue of his son, suffering from a refused widow. a writer who knows where the bodies are buried.
Few literary bicycles earn their own place in the pantheon of writers. Vera Nabokov is alone. Toklax is different. In both cases, their cult devotion to the spouse caused a steady curiosity, some of which could be envy, since many women sought to serve as a muse of genius. But ostentatious self-service in any of his appearance-religious, sexy, homemade and luster feelings. What magnetic force retains such a union untouched? Militia mutual? Is this resentment?
Katz thought too. In 1952, he wrote Toklas Deferentially, asking if they could meet. Despite her alertness in Snoops, she agreed, and starting in this fall, they spent eight hours a day for most of the four months, talking in their Parisian apartment. He did his work before he arrived, tracking the key figures from the youth of Stein, some of which she made his way when Glory came to her head, or reassure Alice, who envied her past. They were happy to refute him on an unknown gertrude: “Gauki”, “non -inherent” and “naive” figure, self -confident, but inconsistent, which discovered her involvement in women.
But Katz also came with a unique authority: exclusive access to Stein's early laptops in her archives at Yale University, many documents that she began to send to America before the Second World War. They included almost every piece of paper at her disposal: manuscripts, magazines, scratched love notes, laundry lists. When Alice “urged her to be more electoral,” Wade writes, “Stein replied that she could not dictate, which future readers can find useful,” and she quotes the saying of Stein, “the facts of life become literature.”
Without restraining anything, Stein seemed to have a foresight of Katz's great insight: that her work needs Rosettic stone, and that her life provides her. Tolax filled the workpieces for him, sometimes involuntarily. Returning home, he scored his notes, but he never delivered them publicly. He died in 2017 in ninety -seven, leaving his documents at Yale University, and Wade, according to her, was the first to read them.
One of the bodies of Katz Exhumed was such a May Bookstaver, the first great love of Stein. They met in Baltimore when Gertrude was a student of John Hopkins and can a recent graduate Brin Maura. In a later life, Stein could not argue. As James Lord writes in elegant memoirs, if anyone has the courage to contradict her: “She would repeat herself … in a loud voice … Then, if necessary again and still louder.” But she was not yet “Gertrude Stein” when she met May, who “fell in the way [Gertrude] “Intellectualized everything,” Wade writes. They were faced with feminism, a book hobby as a “passionate participant in the campaign for the election of women” and the Staine as the author of “degeneration among American women”, an essay that “confirmed that it was a natural place of a woman. Field field in the house. “
