The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
by
[Harcourt, Brace, $3.50]
IT would be easy to follow the lead of the critics who have dismissed The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas as the most amusing book of the year, the inevitable topic of chic dinner conversation, another chart of the emotional life of a predatory, art-loving American exhibitionist. This judgment, however, is as unfair to Miss Stein as to the average reader. For she differs in many important ways from, for example, so well known an autobiographer as Mabel Dodge Luhan. In the first place. Miss Stein is herself an artist. If heretofore, as she regrets, her work has been significant to only a select minority, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas alone is sufficient proof of her unique distinction as a writer. Secondly, her relationship with the artists of whom she writes has never been one-sided or leech-like. No ventriloquist need to exhibit herself through the voices of men greater than herself, but a pioneer recognition of their gifts, drew her to the artists who, seen or unseen, remain her friends. Then, too, Miss Stein, in spite of the somewhat obtuse skepticism of some of her critics, is possessed of a profound and varied sense of humor. What further evidence is needed than the final paragraph of her book? ‘About six weeks ago Gertrude Stein said, it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you. I am going to write it as simply as Defoe did the autobiography of Robinson Crusoe. And she has and this is it.‘
But the quality differentiating Miss Stein most sharply from other contemporary autobiographers, that places her indeed, among the company of the great, is her essential honesty and self-respect. By the average lay reader, ignorant of the intense, concentrated effort necessary to the creation of even a minor work of art,
this self-respect is variously labeled arrogance, conceit, egotism, or vanity. Cellini, Casanova, Rousseau, Franklin, Haydon, Henry Adams, have all been accused ol these faults. Yet without their capacity for self-analysis or revelation, without their consciousness of their individual importance, their interest both objective and subjective in the society to which they belonged, our knowledge of the human mind and heart would be much poorer. Franklin wrote at the beginning of his autobiography, ‘Indeed I never heard or saw the introductory words “Without vanity I may say” etc., but some vain thing immediately followed. Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they have of it themselves: but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded, that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action.‘
To those readers, then, whose own vanity or lack of it frees them to admit the frequent concomitance of modesty and self-respect, and who realize further that without some initial conviction of his own interest or importance no person could ever have written an autobiography, this book will prove an enriching and illuminating experience. For its range is as wide as the continents of Europe and America. The reader will find in this clear-cut, incisive mosaic of words not only the portrait of a great and generous woman; her friends, the painters, musicians, and writers who composed that brilliant, never-to-be-repeated pre-war Paris scene; but also a fund of provocative criticism of the art and life of to-day and of the past. Along with The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and The Education of Henry Adams it raises the question of why three books so essentially American, so revealing of the American mind and temper, should have been written by Americans who drew so much of their sustenance both physical and spiritual from Europe, and particularly from France.
MINA CURTISS