Guess I'm up again.
In the category of
Nonfiction-Memoir, team
Bartleby and the Scriveners is pleased to select
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, by
Gertrude Stein.
This is sort of a double-coup for us at BB&S. I'm thrilled that this book, one of my favourites, fell this far in the draft, and thrilled that I could work out a trade for a second memoir so that I could pick it.
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is the story of how "two Americans"--that is Stein and her lifetime partner Alice Toklas, came to be the central figures in the so-called "Lost Generation"--effectively at the heart of the artistic and literary movement of modernism. Sometimes called the "Mama of Dada" (a slight misnomer in my view), Stein typically wrote in a more gnomic, impenetrable style, but AABT is her first book written in plain old American English--and it was an instant sensation, rising up the bestseller lists, and even being selected for the Book-of-the-Month club, an honour that instantly secured for Stein a curious place among the American middlebrow public in spite of the fact that most of them would not even have encountered her other work, let alone have been particularly good readers of it.
Stein became famous and wealthy overnight--and lost in all of that is the book's central joke: that it is the story of Stein, written by Stein, but narrated in the voice of Alice B. Toklas. The book is sly about this, referring jokingly to Stein as "one of three geniuses that I have met" (the other two being Picasso and Alfred North Whitehead) until the final paragraph of the book reveals the trick to Stein's public. It's a clever, funny, gossipy and enjoyable read if you're at all interested in American expatriate modernism, and you can really see the influence that Stein had on younger writers such as Hemingway (a longtime protege of hers) and Sherwood Anderson. Most of all, it amounts to an aesthetics of art in the modern era, and contains a ton of pithy wisdom about "how to look at art" when it often seems to resist the very idea of "being looked at" in the manner of Fauvism, cubism, etc. etc.