Some years ago, I had an urge to write a historical novel. Fictionalising the life of real people seemed full of potential for aggrandizing the historical record, something like the literary equivalent of turning a paper airplane into a supersonic jet. As a first-time novelist, I had much to learn, particularly about using real life characters in fiction. Of all those I could have picked, I chose Alice B. Toklas. When asked why, I liked to say because she was an enigma. In truth what first appealed to me was that she was an expert in French cooking. As it turned out, I might have been better off writing a recipe book.
When most people think of Alice B. Toklas, if they think of her at all, they might recall the old Peter Sellers movie “I Love You Alice B. Toklas”, or the book “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” or even, if they’re interested in food, “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook”. But in all these cases, it’s the name, not the woman that registers. And in the case of both the movie and the cookbook, it’s her recipe for haschisch fudge (or hash brownies) that eclipses everything else.
That my choice of muse wasn’t promising became apparent almost at the outset. The literature was not kind to her, photographs, many of which were taken in her later years, were merciless, and history by and large has mocked, lampooned, scorned and belittled her. On the face of it, with some justification.
Alice, to put it bluntly, was weird looking. She was very short, swarthy, with a huge, hooked nose, severely cut bangs, heavily lidded eyes and terrible dress sense. From adolescence on she sported a conspicuous moustache, which for some reason she never felt the need to depilate. Perhaps it was a statement, like Frida Kahlo’s unibrow, a symbol of her derision for conventional ideas of feminine beauty. But it made her an easy target for mockery. As she aged, things got worse, as they do. Everything about her drooped and shrivelled. She became crone-like, witchy looking. Her moustache thickened.
Physical handicaps of course can be redeemed by strengths of character. But according to both contemporaries and historians, Alice was acid-tongued, bitchy, shrewish, repellent, treacherous, malicious and manipulative, a very nasty woman.
This worried me, having been taught protagonists should be likeable, or at least empathetic. But it might work, I thought, if I could exploit her nastiness by making her an anti-hero (a kind of female Hannibal Lecter). Research might have to be creatively adapted in the service of attracting readers. Fortunately, even the most literal reading of Alice’s history lends itself to liberal interpretation.
Acting as general factotum, amanuensis, promoter, secretary, editor, lover and literary “wife”, Alice shared her life with Gertrude Stein in Paris from the time they met in 1907 until Stein’s death in 1946. During that almost forty-year partnership the couple strictly adhered to the patriarchal model of matrimony. Alice leapt into the role of handmaiden to Stein as if born to it. There was no pretence of equality, let alone division of labour. Alice was the caretaker in every sense of the word. What cemented her indispensability was that she reinforced Stein’s grandiose view of herself as literary genius. All through the long mean years of universal rejection, Alice validated, mollified and polished Stein’s ego, acted not only as first reader but often only reader. While the world mocked Stein’s incomprehensible babble, Alice applauded.
While this isn’t uncommon among literary partnerships of any sexual orientation, what stands out is Alice’s resolute self-effacement. It’s as if she wanted to erase herself. Photographs show her fading into the background, a blurred figure, sidelined, secondary, a “queer bird-like shadow” as one commentator observed. At first this annoyed me. This supposedly avant-garde relationship was a parody of heterosexual marital inequality with Stein as the overbearing man of the house and Alice as the all-suffering spousal doormat.
What was wrong with the woman? Didn’t she have a backbone?
But Alice the meek and mild didn’t fit with the other view of Alice – the shrew, the bitch, the manipulator. There was something implausible here. As I read further it began to look like Alice’s apparent servitude might have been deliberately deceptive. What, then, was she hiding, I wondered.
I kept finding more and more evidence to suggest that far from being subservient, Alice was in fact the power behind the throne. Many who knew the pair resented her authority. Allegedly she acted out her gatekeeping role with the fierceness of a snarling terrier. If Alice didn’t like someone or (as was the case with Hemingway) was envious of their relationship with Stein, they were banished from the Steinian salon forthwith. That her word was Gertrude’s command is illustrated in an oft-quoted incident arising from an interview Stein gave to journalists on her arrival in New York in 1934. It was reported in the New York Herald Tribune that Stein was speaking to a group of journalists when “Miss Toklas’s slight, menacing figure appeared in the doorway. ‘Come, lovey,’ said Miss Toklas, in a steely-sweet voice. ‘Say good-bye to your guests. They are leaving.’ Miss Stein leaped to her feet and bounded off into the corridor.”
John Malcolm Brinnin, who met her when researching his 1950s biography of Gertrude Stein describes her as “neither mousey, murmurous, dovelike, or supernumary, she was tough, spirited, quick-witted, biting. She threw away wicked lines before I could catch them, pounced with a cackle on a foolish idea or an inflated reputation, kept a straight face as she spoke judgements that sizzled like acid on a grid.” This, and other such observations, make a mockery of what Janet Malcolm described in her book “Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice“, “the official myth of genius and caretaker”.
Here then was the key to the real Alice. It fitted her so much better than “mousy”, “murmurous” or, heaven forbid “dovelike”. She began to seem, if not quite Hannibal Lecter, nasty enough to provoke curiosity and certainly an eligible muse.
New vistas began to unfold. Audacious ideas began to flower. I started to look more closely at the photograph on the front of “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”. For so long we’ve been fed that image – the hulking author at her equally hulking desk, wresting out words, while the handmaiden hovers anxiously at the door.
Alice, we know, was transcriber, typist and editor (even during one misbegotten venture publisher) but what if her role went beyond midwife? How fine a line is there between editing and collaborating? When does influence become intervention? Scholars over the years have debated the extent of Alice’s editorial involvement. There’s enough evidence to convince some she wrote at least parts of the lesser-known works and amended others so proactively that it verged on collaboration. And when we look at “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”, that shock bestseller that made Stein an overnight literary celebrity, the questions loom even larger. From the day it was published there’s been ongoing contention as to its true authorship. Allegedly written by Stein using Alice as ventriloquist’s dummy with the big reveal held back until the last paragraph, it was a sleight of hand unparalleled in literary history.
Much has been made of the fact that within the whole of Stein’s oeuvre this book is a stylistic anomaly. It was, unlike her other writing, easily understood by the “common” reader. It was conversational, wry, ironic, an uncanny replica of Alice’s loquaciousness. It’s not unusual of course for one partner to subconsciously absorb the other’s spoken mannerisms, but this was something more.
There’s this by Maurice Grosser, a writer and painter who knew the couple well and wrote the scenario for two of Stein’s operas: “Gertrude’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is made up word for word of the stories I have heard Alice tell. In fact, the autobiography presents an exact rendition of Alice’s conversation, of the rhythm of her speech and of the prose style of her acknowledged works. It is such a brilliant and accurate pastiche that I am unable to believe that Gertrude with all her genius could have composed it and I remain convinced that the book is entirely Alice’s work and published under Gertrude’s name only because hers was the more famous.”
And this by Virgil Thompson, the composer who collaborated with Stein on her operas: “the book is in every way except actual authorship Alice Toklas’s book; it reflects her mind, her language, her private view of Gertrude, also her unique narrative powers. Every story in it is told as Alice herself had always told it… every story that ever came into the house eventually got told in Alice’s way, and this was its definitive version.”
So, who was pulling whose strings? Who was speaking with whose voice? Who was in fact the actual author? In terms of a book concept, I’d found the yellow brick road. Exhilarating hypotheses sprang to mind. The phrase “literary hoax” murmured in my ear. In historical fiction the facts are manipulable. What matters is the story, how plausible you can make it, how provocative. We shall never know the truth, but in this case the evidence was more than enough to nudge theory into fiction. And in historical fiction, how important is the truth anyway? Like memoir and indeed memory itself, the line between what happened and what we’d like to think happened wobbles.
Fuelled by possibility, the story grew larger, took on ever more fantastical proportions, expanded into realms of fictive innovation unimagined at the outset. Along with the conceptual scope, the word count expanded exponentially too until the thing took on a Tolstoyan magnitude. Like a runaway horse, it carried me far beyond the boundaries of safe territory for a writer of my inexperience. It needed the kind of forceful redirecting and reining in I couldn’t give it.
What was worse, along the way I somehow lost Alice. My character, my unlikely muse had been sacrificed in service to the plot. What remained wasn’t much more than a fictional device, a deus ex machina to affect a dénouement for those who’d usurped her story. Along the way I learnt something about writing fiction and contriving plots but more importantly I learnt something about truth. Contrary to my glib assumption that in historical fiction it doesn’t matter, I think now a certain kind of truth is essential. Whether historically accurate or not, the facts of the story must serve the concept of the book. But the facts of the character, the truth you come to know about him or her override everything else. Once you learn a character, their voice inhabits you and it’s that voice that drives the narrative, not your fevered imagination or your meticulously structured narrative arc.
Having lived with enough introspection about where I went wrong, I now ask myself where, if anywhere, I go from here. I like the idea of Hilary Mantel, who says about the true purpose of historical fiction, “If it’s done honestly, it doesn’t say, ‘Believe this,’ it says, ‘Consider this’”. That is what I’d like to say now about Alice. I’d like to look beyond the image, the speculation, the myth and write a rendition of “the truth” that takes the handmaiden, the cookbook author, the gatekeeper, the joke and makes her fully human.
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