Born On This Day- April 30th... Alice B. Toklas

The famous pair with Toklas on the right.

Alice Babette Toklas left Seattle for Paris when she was 30 years old. In Paris she met Gertrude Stein. The 2 women were a couple for the next 39 years, living through WW1 & WW2, the apex of The Lost Generation, & a collection of very famous friends. They were positively partners. Toklas was Stein’s secretary, editor, critic... & muse.

Their books' titles were quite deceptive; The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written Stein & had next to nothing to do with Toklas & The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, although it contains recipes, was more a memoir of a life friends like Janet Flanner, Picasso, Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, & Virgil Thomson, along a collection of over 300 recipes.

Toklas lived another 20 years after Stein’s death. At the end of her life she was broke. The family of Stein claimed the famous paintings & royalties. In those final years Toklas was plagued with financial difficulties. She had no choice after Stein’s heirs took all the famous paintings left to her, except to write a memoir.

The much renowned recipe for marijuana brownies started when Toklas signed a contract with Harper's to write a cookbook in 1952. She was a known as a very goodcook, but what Harper’s wanted was not so much recipes but tales of her life with Gertrude Stein.

Toklas, then in her mid-70s, didn’t have enough pages to call her tome a book. She added several recipes, including them that would become renowned: “This is the food of Paradise. It might provide an entertaining refreshment for a Ladies' Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR, with euphoria & brilliant storms of laughter, ecstatic reveries & extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better."

The editors at Harper's spotted the suspicious special ingredient- canabis ingredients & cut the recipe out, but the publisher of the British edition didn't. The press promptly went nuts. The London Times: "The late Poetess Gertrude Stein & her constant companion 7 autobiographee, Alice B. Toklas, used to have gay old times together in the kitchen. Some of the unique delicacies that were whipped up will soon be cataloged, in a wildly epicurean tome which is already causing excited talk on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the most gone concoction was her hashish fudge." The book would go on to be the best seller for either of the lesbian pair.

Here is the recipe: "Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of stone dates, dried figs, shelled almonds & peanuts: chop these & mix them together. A bunch of Canibus Sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit & nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake & cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. 2 pieces are quite sufficient. Obtaining the canibus may present certain difficulties. It should be picked & dried as soon as it has gone to seed & while the plant is still green."

Just a few years ago, I had an acquaintance (now living in San Francisco with a rich boyfriend) that made a variation of this recipe. With only one half of a serving, I was unable to raise my head off the pillow. His advice: “Don’t sit down. After you eat one you need to go hiking or dancing. Keep moving.”  I was left giggling, horny & hungry & unable to move.

Although Toklas converted to Catholicism late in life, the pair of Jewish lesbians are buried next to each other in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. 

The Toklas name would become a part of the vernacular of the pot smoking world.

My Second Favorite Structure In The World.

Remember that crazy period in the aughts when Americans were required to be anti-French. Freedom Fries? Well, I never bought it. I am an unabashed Francofile. I took the stairs to level 3, & I stood on the observation deck, & everywhere I went I tried to sneak a view of it every chance that I could find. I have only been to Paris once, but I can't ever get tired of looking at The Eiffel Tower in photos & in films. The landmark turns 123 today.

Born On This Day- March 30th... Poet Paul Verlaine

I know of this because I took one class in 19^th century Poetry, a course I would have normally spent doodling, but with a dynamic teacher & the fact that the principals were absinth drinking, opium smoking homosexuals appealed to me.

Verlaine by Courbet

Paul Verlaine's life swayed between the cruel & criminal & the callow & chaste. He married a young girl in 1870 but after a year fell in love with 17 year old poet- Arthur Rimbaud. The pair, along with Charles Baudelair, formed a movement titled The Decadents. In The Decadents’ writing, only the self is important, & the function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation & unique impressions. In spite of the vagueness of his poetry, Verlaine showed a careful craftsmanship in his compositions, using simple, musical language.

"There is weeping in my heart
Like the rain falling on the city."
(from Romances sans Paroles, 1874)

When Verlaine began his affair with the young Rimbaud, his marriage was shattered. In this impossible situation Verlaine left his family in Paris, adopted the Bohemian life shared with Rimaud in London. Their relationship ended in 1873 when Verlaine, drunk & desolate, tried to shoot Rimbaud after a quarrel. He was jailed for 18 months. When he was examined by the court physicians they noted that his "anus can be dilated rather significantly by a moderate separation of the buttocks & bears on his person the signs of active and passive pederastic habits."

During his imprisonment Verlaine studied Shakespeare & wrote Romances Sans Paroles. "& here is my heart which beats only for you." The collection is considered his masterpiece.

After being released, Verlaine returned to Paris & Rimbaud who proceeded to get Verlaine drunk, beat him & force him blaspheme against his Catholic faith. Verlaine moved back to England where he taught French before returning to France in 1877 to teach at the college of Rethel. It was in this period that Verlaine composed most of the poems, many with religious sentiment that reflects the poet's conversion to Roman Catholicism. In 1879 he gave up teaching, adopted one of his pupils- Lucien Létinois, & they had a farm together. The farm went bankrupt, & Verlaine returned to Paris.

In 1883 Verlaine's Lucien died of typhus & his mother died. Even though he was drinking heavily during this period, Verlaine was celebrated as the leading poet of France. He published such critical works, short biographical studies of poets, short stories, sacred & profane verse. He rewrote old poems, which he earlier had not regarded worthy of publication. Verlaine spent time in & out of hospitals, continued to drink, slept in slums, & spent a month in prison. He also suffered from rheumatism, cirrhosis, jaundice, diabetes, & a broken heart.

Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches
Et puis voici mon coeur, qui ne bat que pour vous,
Ne le déchirez pas avec vos deux mains blanches,
Et qu'à vos yeux si beaux l'humble présent soit doux.
J'arrive tout couvert encore de rosée
Que le vent du matin vient glacer à mon front.
Souffrez que ma fatique, à vos pieds reposée,
Réve des chers instants qui la délasseront.
Sur votre jeune sein laissez rouler ma tête
Toute sonore encor de vos derniers baisers;
Laissez-la s'apaiser de la bonne tempête,
Et que je dorme un peu puisque vous reposez.

In his last years, Verlaine wasted his royalties he earned on prostitutes he lived with a gay man, Bibi-la-Purée, who was especially famous for stealing umbrellas.

Verlaine: "For me, Rimbaud is an ever-living reality, a sun that burns inside me that does not want to be put out..." In his autobiographical writings he denied any sexual relationship with Rimbaud.

Verlaine died in Paris, at the age of 52, in 1896. His funeral was a public event, with thousands of Parisians following the casket to the Batignolles cemetery. Despite his fame, Verlaine died in poverty.

Born On This Day- March 14th... Sylvia Beach

“In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare & Company, which was the library & bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 Rue de l’Odéon… Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were alive as a small animal’s & gay as a young girl’s, & wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead… she was kind, cheerful & interested, & loved to make jokes & gossip. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

A stranger recently referred to me as “bookish” (along with fat, bald & old). I had always held that bookish meant a cardigan wearing,dotty eccentrics living in small spaces with their books & 7 cats named: Twain, Dickens, Proust, Tolstoy, Poe, Fitzgerald & Rum Tum Tigger.


I suppose I am a bit bookish, with my 100s of books stacked about the house. Books have been a major force in my life since before I could read, & I always loved to spend time in bookstores. It is hard to grasp that they have become a thing of the past.

Sylvia Beach, in front of the store, with James Joyce

Born on this day in 1887, to a Presbyterian pastor & his wife in Bridgeton, NJ., Nancy Woodridge Beach changed her name to Sylvia Beach when she was a teenager. As a teenager, her father was associate pastor of the American Church in Paris & young Sylvia dreamed that she would someday live in the City of Lights. During WWI, she & her sister volunteered for the Red Cross in Euorpe, & Beach lived the rest of her life abroad.
Beach is one of the best known of the American expatriates of the early 20th century. She owned & operated the bookstore- Shakespeare & Company. The store was the first English language bookshop on Paris’ Left Bank. Shakerpeare & Company was a literary center, lending library, & publishing company between the 2 World Wars. The frequent visitors icluded: Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, Andre Gide, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, Tornton Wilder, Picasso, Man Ray, Hemingway & Fitzgerald. Beach introduced writers & artists to each other & ensured writers had pocket money and reading material.  Beach is remembered as the publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which American presses considered obscene & radical.


I wish I could ride in the limo from Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris. I would like to go Shakespeare & Company in Parisin 1925.


When the Nazis invaded Paris, Beach refused to leave her books, as she was ordered to. When a German officer coming to her shop & asking, in English, to purchase the copy of Finnegans Wake in the shop window. Beach refused. The officer, in a rage, told her that the next time he returned, it would be with a squad who would confiscate her entire collection. He left, & Beach promptly boxed up her entire collection, hid it away, & painted over the Shakespeare & Co. sign. The Germans did return, & while they did not get her books, they got her. She was sent to a camp where she stayed for the next 6 months, surrounded by French Jewish prisoners who would all end up in Auschwitz. There’s another great anecdote about Ernest Hemingway, who was with the Allied army when they liberated Paris& Hemingway went personally to liberate Shakespeare & Company.


She wrote it all down & immortalized her store & the expatriate literary circle in an excellent memoir- Shakespeare & Company.


The great love of Beach’s life was Adrienne Monnier, a Frenchwoman who owned a bookshop called La Maison des Amis des Livres, literally across the street from Shakespeare & Company. Beach & Monnier lived together from 1920 to 1936, when Monnier’s affair with another women caused them to separate. In true lesbian fashion, they soon reconciled & remained together Monnier’s death in 1955. Though Beach lived most of her life abroad, she is buried, not in Paris, but in a Princeton cemetery with her family. Her papers were donated to the Princeton Library.


There exists, a Sylvia Beach Hotel on the Oregon coast, a sort of large B&B with a literary theme, no phones, no TV, no Wi-Fi, & rooms named: The Mark Twain, The Emily Dickenson, The Charles Dickens & The Ernest Hemingway. Please, don’t make me stay there. I wish they featured rooms such as: The Franz Kafka, The Sylvia Plath, The Cormac McCarthy, & The William Golding.

Born On This Day- February 3rd... Gertrude Stein

It seems disingenuous to label a work of art charming, but Midnight in Paris has so much charm, so many deft moments, that I felt of being taken to someplace magical. The film is populated with small turns of great actors playing ex-pats & assorted artists, writers & personalities of 1920s Paris.

This film is an enchanted comedy set in Paris about a family that goes there because of business, & a pair of young people who are engaged to be married have experiences there that change their lives. It's about a young writer's love of Paris, & the illusion people have that a life different from theirs would be much better.

The cameos include a perfectly cast Adrien Brody as Salvedor Dalí. emphasizing the accent each time he says his name, Corey Stoll as a sexy, young Hemingway & Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein. She plays Stein as an Earth-Mother, a no-nonsense, incredibly pragmatic center of artistic activity. her moments in Midnight in Paris are superb. The entire enterprise is as effervescent as champagne. As a fan of Woody Allen's films (especially the films he does not appear in), it is nice to know his work can still intoxicate.

Stein is the sort of author you want people to see you reading when you are in college, or that is how I played it. Stein was a wealthy American art collector & writer who dominated the Paris avant garde in the days of Picasso. She was one of Picasso's boldest collectors, his only real female friend, & the object of one of his most revolutionary paintings. Picasso's Portrait of Gertrude Stein, which hangs in her apartment in the film. She played herself in her literary classic memoir- The Autobiography Of Alice B Toklas that portrays Stein through the eyes of her lover Alice B Toklas.

I noticed one of my kids at work reading Stein for about a week. I couldn’t stand it & at one point asked: “Really? This how you want to spend your 10 minute break, reading Gertrude Stein? Shouldn't you be reading a Twighlight Saga? Well, at least it will make you feel that your break is a half an hour.”

Stein’s work can be exasperating & exhilarating. Her novels, plays, operas, valentines, poems, autobiography, lectures are challenging for me. Often the entrance is not apparent; there is no door. Here is an example, from the poem- If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso:

Shutters shut & open so do queens. Shutters shut & shutters & so shutters shut & shutters & so & so shutters & so shutters shut & so shutters shut & shutters and so. & so shutters shut & so & also. & also &

 so &

 so & also.

Exact resemblance to exact resemblance the exact resemblance as exact as a resemblance, exactly as resembling, exactly resembling, exactly in resemblance exactly a resemblance,

 exactly & resemblance.

 For this is so.

 Because.

Stein was born in the USA 138 years ago on this day-February 3rd. Stein died at the age of 72 in Neuilly-sur-Seine & is buried in Paris in the Père Lachaise cemetery. When Stein was being wheeled into the operating room for surgery on her stomach, she asked Toklas: "What is the answer?" Toklas did not reply, Stein: "In that case, what is the question?" There is a monument to Stein on the Upper Terrace of Bryant Park, NYC.

Together, Stein & Toklas hosted a salon in Paris that attracted expatriate American writers: Ernest Hemingway, Paul Bowles, Thornton Wilder & Sherwood Anderson, & painters: Picasso, Matisse, & Braque. Stein & Toklas were a couple for 40 years, until Stein’s death in 1946.