Desperately Serious
What is Remembered. By Alice B. Toklas. (Michael Joseph, 21s.)
Ir was The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas which gave Gertrude Stein in late middle age the Wider reputation that she coveted: acting as her own Boswell, she wrote• of herself and life in Paris as though seen through the eyes of her constant companion. Now, in extreme old age, Miss Toklas has written her own reminiscences.
Like Gertrude Stein's book, What is Remem- bered is concerned far more with the period of the relationship than with the rest of her life. But Miss Toklas does not tell us anything new about their forty years together, and instead of giving a frank account of what kept them to- gether (which might have been embarrassing but would certainly have been invaluable) she has chosen to relate little more than social events and encounters with the well-known and the now- forgotten.
Much of this was already in the Autobio- graphy, but that book was written fifteen years before Gertrude Stein's death, and Miss Toklas's record of those later years, brief as it is, is worth having. They visited America in 1934, where
film directors gathered around Miss Stein
and said, We would like to know how you came to have your enormous popularity, and she-said. By having a small audience, whereupon they shoved their chairs away from her, dis- couraged.. . .
and where Miss Toklas met James Branch Cabell who asked me, Is Gertrude Stein serious? Desperately, I replied. That puts a different light on it, he said. For you, I said, not for me.
Their resoluteness in staying on in France' during the Occupation was admirable, and deserved description at far greater length; but the book ends with a passage where the simplicity and spareneSs 5;,f the style is for once quite appropriate:
. . . I sat next to her and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question? Then the whole afternoon was troubled, contused and very uncertain, and later in the afternoon they took her away on a wheeled stretcher to the operating room and I never saw her again.
B. B. JOHNSON
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