The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The narrative begins to recount Toklas and Stein’s life in Paris after Toklas moved into the rue de Fleurus residence. Prior to the move, Toklas resided in hotels and small apartments that she shared with a friend from California. Toklas helped Stein with the proofs of Three Lives and began to type The Making of Americans. When Toklas came to Paris there were very few Americans, but over the years, increasing numbers of them began to appear on Saturday nights at Stein’s residence.

Toklas’s place was to sit with the wives of geniuses while Stein and their husbands were occupied. Stein always liked “the adventure of a new” painter and told Toklas that “once everybody knows they are good the adventure is over” (74). The narrator argues that Cubism is an essentially Spanish movement. In Spanish villages, the houses were cube-shaped, and Picasso had the photographic evidence to prove it. Indeed, Stein argued that only Spaniards could be Cubists, and therefore the movement’s chief devotees were Picasso and Juan Gris, even if Frenchman Georges Braque was also a pioneer. Toklas recalls that in Spain, a place she and Stein revisited, even the postcards were inside cubes.