“Experience is never at bargain price.”
TRQ: Alice B. Toklas, Born April 30, 1877
Writer and gatekeeper for one of the Parisian avant-garde salons of the 20th Century, Alice Babette Toklas, long-term life partner to writer Gertrude Stein, was born in San Francisco, California. Although she was born to a family of observant Jews, Toklas did not practice the religion. She attended the University of Seattle, and it has been said that her favourite writer was Henry James, whose work partly inspired her desire to explore Europe.
In 1897, just before Toklas turned 20, her mother died, and she spent much of her time taking care of her male relatives. She had also begun to realize her lesbian attraction towards some of her female friends, and increasingly sought an escape from the expectations that she would marry and have children.
In 1906, the San Francisco earthquake brought Gertrude Stein’s brother and sister-in-law Michael and Sarah back from France to assess the extent of damages to their property. While in San Francisco, they encouraged Toklas with their stories of Parisian life, and by September 1907, she too was on her way.
Almost immediately on her arrival in Paris, Toklas met Gertrude, who at the time was lonely, not confident in her writing, and was having difficulty with her sexuality. Toklas claimed to have intuited genius in Stein, as she had in many others, and the two women soon became lovers.
In her life with Stein, Toklas not only took on the familiar tasks of running a household, but she also typed, published and publicized the writer’s work, and managed their joint social and professional obligations. Their social circle included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso, among other literary and artistic legends, while Ernest Hemingway was banned on suspicion that he was intending to seduce Stein. While Stein had already been proclaimed a literary genius, Toklas became considerably more well-known after Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1934.
Toklas would only begin her own writing after Stein’s death in 1946. Published in 1954, The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook includes recipes of Toklas and Stein’s famous writer, artist and musician friends, as well as anecdotes of Stein’s culinary tastes, idiosyncrasies and adventures. To the dismay of Toklas, her publishers released a heavily edited second cookbook, Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present, in 1958. In the meantime, she also wrote articles for The New Republic and The New York Times, as well as other magazines and newspapers. In 1963 Toklas published her autobiography What Is Remembered, where she corroborates an image of Stein as she was known to the public.
Some years after Stein’s death, Toklas converted to Catholicism in the hopes of reuniting with her partner after death. In her later years, Toklas would face many health and financial hardships. In 1964, Toklas was evicted from her Parisian apartment. Bedridden, she had been suffering from arthritis, and cataracts left her largely unable to see the impressive collection of artworks that she had once collected with Stein.
Living off funding provided by writers and her old friends, she moved to the Rude de la Convention. On March 7, 1967, Toklas died and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, next to Stein.
In 1989 The San Francisco Board of Supervisors renamed the Myrtle Street block between Polk Street and Van Ness Avenue as Alice B. Toklas Place, as she was born nearby on O’Farrell Street.
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