Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

edited by Kay Turner

St. Martin's, 160 pp., $17.95

The summer I was 19, I carried The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas all around France. I skimmed past Picasso and other famous people whose names I was just learning, searching for a glimpse of the intimacy that Modernism's two most famous women shared. Of course, Stein offered nothing to feed my late adolescent curiosity. Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, edited by folklorist, band leader, lesbian activist, and former Austinite Kay Turner, delivers. This small volume of love notes, mostly written by Stein after working alone late into the night, reveals the deep affection and devotion of what may be Modernism's most successful marriage.

"My dear wife," Stein writes, "Here we are in London on our honey/moon and we saw the moon and we/said it was the most beautiful and/the most xtraordinary moon that we/had ever seen, thanks for the/moon and thanks for the honey-moon." From this first celebration of their 40-year union, Stein expresses her devotion to all that is Alice. Much has been written about whether Stein played the masculine "heavy" to Alice, the feminine caretaker, or whether Alice actually was the controlling one, cutting off friendships that threatened her role as housewife of 27, rue de Fleurus. These love notes tell a much more complex story of gratitude, playfulness, intimate caregiving, eroticism, and shared commitment to their cottage industry -- Stein's writing.

More constant than a muse, more appreciated than a secretary, Toklas played the role of keeper of the hearth, Turner argues -- the flame being Stein herself. For Stein, there seemed to be little difference between her love for Toklas and her work. "Baby precious," Stein begins after a night of writing, "hubby is very/sleepy, he worked a little/and he loved a lot, what,/his blessed baby wifey thats/what --"

There is much in Baby Precious Always Shines for Stein devotees, including an extremely convincing explanation of Stein's use of the word "cow," which may turn critics on their ears. But this book is really for lovers, gay or straight, who will find here the simple, embarrassing, honest voice of love. "I have just looked up," Toklas writes, apparently passing the note to Stein as the two worked across from one another, "to see if you were as beautiful as I remembered. -- Notes are a very beautiful form of literature."

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Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Source: https://www.austinchronicle.com/books/2000-03-03/76036/

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